Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
“Master of the Universe”, my demo song showing what the Quad Cortex mini can do.
Caught
On the record, you don’t have to worry about hooking this thing up to your audio interface; just plug it into your computer with a USB-C cable and it becomes a 24-bit, 48KHz interface. (On Macs, it’s class-compliant and requires no drivers; it even works with iOS devices. Neural creates the necessary driver for Windows.)
The Quad Cortex mini excels with multiple inputs, making it easy to record both a dry electric guitar track and a heavily influenced song, for example. If you later change your mind about the sound, you can always “reamplify” the dry signal by routing it back to the device and recording it with different settings. You can even monitor mics through this thing thanks to the XLR input and (for condenser mics) phantom power support.
The Quad Cortex mini can also take over hardware you own or come across. This can happen in two ways: 1) on the device or 2) in the cloud.
The device-based system, which the company calls Neural Capture Version 1, requires you to connect your device to both an output (to play the system’s test tones) and an input on the mini. (Note: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES connect the actual speaker outputs from a tube amp directly to the mini. The power level is too high.)
Various known sounds are then played through this loop, and the mini’s software analyzes the differences between the sound it sends and the sound it receives. For this, machine learning algorithms work locally on the device. Neural says the Capture 1 system can handle overdrive pedals, amps and cabs.
The newer system, called Neural Capture Version 2, is “an evolution of Neural Capture trained through Cortex Cloud,” the company says. “This option provides higher resolution Captures, making it particularly powerful for touch-sensitive devices such as knobs, compressors, and certain amplifiers.” Capture 2 is said to be able to model “subtle behaviors such as volume knob sweeps, amp bends and flourishes, fast transitions and mix controls.”
