bmusic - Product News and Reviews

bmusic is pleased to announce their apppointment as the Australian distributor for ISP Technologies products from the USA!
THE noise reduction systems of the moment for guitarists are available now in Australia thanks to our new relationship with ISP Technologies.

January, 2006 - bmusic appointed as the official Australian distributor for ISP Technologies out of the USA.
First to arrive will be the much lauded ISP Decimator Pedal and the guitar rack version, the ProRackG Decimator. Other stuff from the ISP camp includes the Steve Lukather Active Guitar Sub endorsed by Christian Wolburs (Fear Factory) and the Theta head which, as a full stack, is a whopping 1100 watts! ISP Technologies also build the biggest and best in drool worthy pro audio gear like $30,000+ 4-way line array systems and such, but we'll save all that for later!

So who are ISP Technologies?
James "Buck" Waller started ISP after he sold the assets of Rocktron® to GHS Strings®. Taking the original core engineering team that built Rocktron® to a dynasty in the early 90's, the same team that developed the HUSH™, Intellifex™, Chameleon™, Project X™, Voodu Valve™, Prophesy™, among others, ISP was launched to continue the development of cutting edge products for the serious musician.

To this end, Buck Waller, inventor of HUSH™, developed the Decimator Noise Reduction products, the Decimator Pedal and ProRackG. The Decimator is quickly becoming THE noise reduction to have. Artists from Aerosmith, Anthrax, Devil Driver, Greenday, and Johnny Hiland among others are seeking out and using ISP's noise reduction products.

And a little more insight into Buck Waller, penned by the man himself:
It all started with a little plastic guitar with plastic strings…honest! I wanted to be a guitar player since I was a little kid. My parents told me that as soon as I could play a song on my plastic guitar, they would buy me a real one. By the end of the week, I had mastered Greensleaves! Or as close to “mastered” as a 10 year old boy on a plastic guitar can come. Anyway, I got my first acoustic guitar and started to really apply myself. My first concert was Jeff Beck and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I wanted to be the next Jeff Beck. I started playing seriously and started gigging in the local bars when I was 14 years old. Let me tell you, my parents were none too happy to have to sit in all the local bars just so I could play. They remained supportive, however, and they were happier than I when I turned “legal”. No more mandatory bar gigs for the ‘rents. Soon my band was gigging all over the Midwest and Canada but there were no “big breaks” to be had. The California coast began calling and the band headed west.

Playing the Los Angeles club scene was a trip…especially for a Midwestern Michigan boy. But it was in those clubs that the seeds for a business were sown. As a self- taught electronics geek, I kept making different boxes to give me a cooler guitar sound. Pretty soon, other guitar players began to ask me to make electronic boxes for them too. While a record deal remained elusive for the band, more fellow musicians were asking about the gear I had invented for myself. Soon an idea began to hatch…if the record labels weren’t beating down my door and I didn’t really have the money or connections to make it happen, I would go back to Michigan, start a company selling my gear, meet all the right people, THEN I would make it big!

And that’s the way it happened…sort of. When I returned to Michigan, I started a company called Rocktron® Corporation (maybe you’ve heard of it!) with my brother. For seventeen years the company was built around what started as my homemade gear. One of the first products I did for Rocktron® was the patented HUSH™ Noise Reduction System. The HUSH™ ended up being so innovative, that six patents applied to that product alone. That was only the beginning. As technology continued to advance, I hired my other brother Jon to come on board and bring with him his considerable digital signal processing engineering skills. With his help, we successfully launched a complete line of DSP guitar rack products as well as our then current analog offerings. One of my personal favorites was the Intellifex™. Way cool. The Voodoo Valve™, Chameleon™, and Prophesy™ were also on my list of favorites. Along the line I also developed the patented Circle Surround™, the only truly stereo 5-speaker matrix on the market. Although I sold this technology, it can currently be found in the latest Kenwood® Surround Receivers.

I am sure by now that you get the big picture…young boy with big dream goes for it. Now although Rocktron® ended up selling to most major artists, I never did get my recording contract. I did, however, continue to be intrigued by the way technology was headed. I learned that in this business, if you don’t have the cutting edge technology, you don’t have the product. I am sure you are now asking yourself, “What does this have to do with ISP Technologies? I thought he founded Rocktron® Corporation.” Well, I did. However, due to difficulties beyond my control, I decided to sell Rocktron® and take the same cutting edge, forward thinking design team that kept Rocktron cranking for 17 years with me to start ISP Technologies. ISP (that’s Intelligent Signal Processing) Technologies was formed out of the passion to continue to develop state of the art Audio technologies and innovative products for the Pro-Audio, Music Industry, Home Theatre, and Consumer Electronics industries. So the moral to the story is, follow your passion…you never know where it may lead you.

So what exactly are the ISP Technologies Decimator products?

Decimator Pedal

Find out why everyone is saying this is the best noise reduction pedal available anywhere! ISP Technologies presents the latest generation in Noise Reduction technology, the DECIMATOR™ NOISE REDUCTION SYSTEM. From the original inventors of HUSH™ noise reduction comes the latest, most advanced, patent pending, state of the art technology in real time noise reduction. The Decimator offers a revolutionary breakthrough in Noise Reduction processing with an unparalleled level of performance. The HUSH system, as well as all other noise reduction systems suffers from one major problem inherent in their design: The system cannot be immediately responsive to very short-term staccato notes. The typical downward expander noise reduction system suffers from a dead zone in the release response characteristic which causes a compromise in tracking both fast decaying notes and long sustained notes. Decimator Pedal

The Decimator design offers a novel approach to tracking the envelope of the input signal called Time Vector Processing. Due to this novel approach in controlling the expander, the Decimator system will instantly respond to short staccato notes and, at the same time, will provide a very slow ripple free control of long sustained notes. This means that the Decimator noise reduction system is the most transparent and highest performance noise reduction system available. The Decimator Pedal is extremely easy to use; simply inset the Decimator at the end of your chain of existing pedals or, insert the Decimator Pedal in the effects loop of your amplifier to clean up the noise present at the amplifier input as well as the noise in the amplifiers pre-amp section. Packaged in a rugged, beautifully polished smooth chrome chassis, the Decimator pedal offers reliability, performance and beauty in one compact pedal. Audition the Decimator today and experience the highest level of performance available in a noise reduction system.

Decimator Pedal Technical Specifications:

Input Impedance:

Maximum Input Level:

Effective Noise Reduction:

Dynamic Range:

Total Harmonic Distortion:

Power consumption:

Release response:

500K ohms

+12dbu

greater than 60db

greater than 100db

.05% typical

35mA @9VDC

Program dependant based on Time Vector Processing

Click HERE for pricing information or to purchase the ISP Decimator Pedal.

Decimator ProRackG

ISP raises the bar on ultimate guitar performance with the new, novel patent pending Decimator™ ProRackG. The Decimator ProRackG guitar noise reduction system defines a new standard for excellence in real time noise reduction performance. The Decimator ProRackG was designed to provide the maximum possible performance in a rack mount dual channel noise reduction system designed specifically for extremely high gain guitar amplifiers. The Decimator ProRackG is the only system in the world designed with two channels of single ended noise reduction configured specifically for high gain guitar applications allowing one channel to deliver noise reduction for the guitar directly and a second channel to eliminate amplifier gain noise. Channel one eliminates the 50 or 60 cycle hum, buzz, stage light noise and any other noise picked up directly by the instrument. The ProRack channel one output drives the front end of your guitar amplifier and eliminates all of the input noise picked up by the guitar. The control circuit of the second channel detects and tracks the guitar signal directly while the signal processing audio chain is patched into the effects loop of the high gain guitar amplifier. Now you can quiet down even the most insane amounts of noise with any amplifier system incorporating a series effects loop. The Decimator ProRackG will also solve the typical high gain feedback or squealing problem that the high gain guitar player fights. You know how difficult this problem can be. You play staccato notes and in between each note you have a squeal or burst of feedback that's virtually impossible to control. Problem solved with the Decimator ProRackG. By proper setting of the threshold for channel one and channel two you can eliminate this problem for good. The Decimator ProRackG has dual processing channels incorporating both low-level downward expansion and dynamically controlled low-pass filtering in a very easy to use single rack space unit.

The Decimator ProRackG is based on ISP Technologies patent pending “Time Vector Processing” which provides the most adaptively dynamic release response characteristics of any real time noise reduction system. The patent pending Time Vector Processing dynamic response circuit is used to control the release time constant of both the downward expander and dynamic filter. Not only does the Decimator ProRackG deliver the most stunning noise reduction, it also solves the problem of needing to adjust the Threshold setting every time you change gain or switch channels. By using the input guitar signal to drive both channels' level detection circuitry, the ProRackG needs no other adjustments once the thresholds are set based on the guitar input. This will give you the correct threshold with clean, crunch and even monstrous amounts of gain and if you use pedals you can insert them in the loop between the output of the Decimator Channel 1 and the input of the guitar amplifier. The block diagram below shows the typical system connections for use with a high gain amplifier. Decimator ProRackG

Players keep asking how the ProRackG works without any required change in the threshold when changing from clean to distort, read on: As you can see from the above diagram, the ProRackG has two channels of noise reduction. The guitar plugs directly into the channel 1 input and the level and frequency detectors for both channel 1 and channel 2 measure the direct guitar input signal. This means that changing from a clean sound to a high gain distorted will not affect the signal seen by the detectors. This means that you can use the first Decimator channel to eliminate any noise that the guitar picks up directly like transformer hum, light noise etc. You simply adjust the threshold of channel 1 to eliminate this front end noise. The second channel is inserted into the effects loop of your amplifier (requires a series effects loop) and this channel will clean up the high gain preamp noise, ground loop hum, and any other noise that you have in this chain. The beauty of its operation is that the second channel is working to clean up this high gain noise but in response to the actual guitar signal, which typically has a much higher dynamic range than what you would see if this channel's detector's were detecting the high gain signal. By setting the threshold of channel 2 to eliminate all of the gain noise when the guitar signal decays into the noise this will also provide the correct setting for your clean channel.

Time Vector Processing is the core technology that makes the Decimator work with such amazing transparency. The Time Vector Processing compares the long term envelope of the input signal with the short term envelope of the input signal and generates a "Time Vector" or "Time Correction" signal. This time correction signal dynamically changes the release response of the expander and dynamic filter. If the input signal is a slow decaying long sustained note the Time Vector Processing circuit senses that the envelope of the input signal is a slowly decaying signal and sets the release time for a slow smooth release. If however, the input signal is a short staccato note with a fast decay the Time Vector circuit will produce a Time Correction signal which will instantaneously change the release time of the downward expander and dynamic filter to an extremely fast response. The Time Vector Processing circuit continuously monitors the input signal and alters the release time allowing the Decimator to adapt its response to provide an optimized response for any guitar signal. The Time Vector Processing circuit provides a variable response time ratio of greater than 1000 to 1. No other real-time noise reduction system can offers this degree of adaptability and tracking.

Here's a review from a Decimator ProRackG customer. Just imagine what the ProRackG will do for your sound!

"My seemingly endless search for the ultimate noise reduction unit has ended! I spent a great amount of time testing just about every unit on the market, and the Decimator ProRackG is hands down the way to go. It is by far the most transparent, smoothest and fastest responding unit I have ever used. Set up and dialing in takes almost no time at all. And the results are incredible! It stops on a dime with super high gain, yet it allows for long sustains. And no longer do I get that annoying full open release when accidentally touching the strings. Another great aspect is being able to use any amp settings, wether it be clean tones, crunch or high gain, and not have to change the settings on the Decimator. It works incredibly well. Thanks to Buck and the rest of the team at ISP Technologies for this great product!"
Mike Gilbert - Severed Savior"

Decimator ProRackG - Technical Specifications

Input Impedance: 470KOHM
Output Impedance: Less than 1KOHM
Maximum Input Level: +20dbu
Dynamic Range: greater than 118db Typical
Effective Noise Reduction: greater than 120db
Power Consumption: 350mA
THD: Less Than .05%
Dimensions:1.75” H x 19” W x 7” D

Click HERE for pricing information or to purchase the ISP Decimator ProRackG.

To hear both the Decimator Pedal and ProRackG in action visit ISP Technologies Sound Samples page HERE.