We might have our answer to why Waves might not be developing AAX dsp versions of their plugins. Today Waves showed us which direction they want to go with the introduction of their new SoundGrid Extreme Server.

The SoundGrid Extreme is an Intel i7 based server housed in rugged 2 units high 19″ rack. According to Waves it is extremely powerful and can run up to 500 instances of their stereo SSL E-channel or the C4 multiband compressor plugins. Apparantly you can run the plugins with a latency as low as 0.8 ms.

At the moment the SoundGrid Server connects to live mixing desks only, like the DiGiCo SD8, via an expansion card and ethernet Connection but I guess nothing stops Waves from supporting their SoundGrid protocol on DAWs somewhere in the future. UAD might have a competitor on the horizon. SoundGrid Pro is a bit like Vienna Ensemble Pro running on a separate Mac or PC that is hooked up via Ethernet to your computer running your DAW. It’ll be interesting to see where Waves is going to take this technology.

To read more about the SoundGrid Extreme Server visit Waves website.