BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. We're live at Winter NAMM '08 in Anaheim, and I'm here with Ben from Access, and we’re looking at the new Virus TI Snow. Tell me a little bit about this.

BEN CROSSLAND: Okay. Well, basically what we've got here is a full Virus TI in terms of the sound engine but we've made it more portable and it's more performance orientated and it's cheaper. Basically, we've got the full sound engine so it's 100% compatible with all the Virus TI sound libraries.

Basically, the buttons here are arranged as an 8 x 8 matrix so that you use these for patch selection. We've got eight banks of ROM sounds and eight banks of RAM sounds, and each has 64 in each. So, you can get to any sound you want within four button pushes. We've got, say, if you want RAM 1, you press bank RAM 1 and then you select which group of eight you want and then the specific patch, so now I can choose RAM 136, and there it is.

Okay. The main difference in terms of the actual power of this thing is that it has 1 DSP instead of 2 of the big TI, so you get roughly half the polyphony. It's a little bit more in many cases so it's saying it's to round about up to 50 voices, depending on the kind of patch you're using, and it's four parts multitimbral, and you just have the one pair of analog outs. However, you do have the USB outs still so we have expanded that to three stereo channels of USB audio, and we still have the Virus control plugin for this. And it's just a slightly customized version which has the 4 parts instead of 16 but otherwise it's identical functionality, so you got your full patch library management and sound editing and total recall and sample accurate timing, all of that that goes with Virus control.

And I'll get back into the interface now actually. As well as the sound selection buttons, we've got some hardwired knobs here fro cutoff and resonance and also the three soft knobs here which are -- they're different depending on what sound do you have. So, all the presets have three functions programmed into them. They're kind of like macros I guess, so they all do something cool to the sound [BEN DEMONSTRATES]. And we've also got shift functionality on these knobs as well, so, for example, on the cutoff knob, if you hold shift and turn that, it'll shorten the envelope on the filter there like that, and the same for the amp envelope. It depends on how the amp envelope is actually pre-programmed, so as long as the decay and release functions are relevant to it, those will have an effect. So, basically it implies it adjusts the decay and release simultaneously for those. And also we've got transpose per octave [BEN DEMONSTRATES].

BILL HOLLAND: [INDISCERNIBLE]

BEN CROSSLAND: Uh [CONTINUES DEMO], transposing octaves there. Volume for the [INAUDIBLE] and panorama as well. We'll get that in stereo I guess, but anyway you get the picture.

BILL HOLLAND: Alright. Well, Ben thank you so much again.

BEN CROSSLAND: Okay. You're welcome.

BILL HOLLAND: I appreciate it, and we'll be back with more on Gearwire.Com from Winter NAMM 2008. I'm Bill Holland.