Because of this tube amp project, I just started looking into all the reactive loads and variations thereupon.
Boss has a Waza thing which is $1299 that combines a reactive load, IRs, effects, and a class D amp to drive your
speakers back again. No way am I going to spend that much. But I might spend $600 on this Suhr thing (which lets you select 1 or 16 IRs from the front panel).
Or, I might spend $300 on a plain reactive load and some money on something else (like a variation on your gizmo)
designed to work with that type of device to add IRs and effects to the signal to send out either to a board or powered speaker like the Tech 21.
You can build your own fine tuned reactive load with quality components for around 200 bucks. This has been very well documented in the following thread:
https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/aikens-reactive-dummy-load.1072793/Unfortunately most pics are gone but it's an informative read.
Many commercial loads are lower quality than that. Also some of the very famous don't have the low resonance circuit.
It's well known the tube amp will start distorting at the reactive resonance frequencies first producing harmonics to the low fundamental which no EQ can add after that. One downside is once you tune your reactive load to your favorite cabinet that's it. It's possible of course to build a variable resonance version but then you'll need some custom inductors which makes the task somewhat more complicated.
I'll make some comments from the position of an end user NOT interested in writing code and experiment with creating effects whatsoever.
I'll agree with Larry that most of time you have to keep it simple for the fellow musicians.
Having many features is good but not for everyone. Most people just get confised and you have to explain over and over what is what.
Since Larry mentioned reactive loads years ago I started looking for an affordable and
readily available IR module. In the mean time (before Marks's board was available) the AMT
Pangaea CP-16 module came out. NOTE that to this day it's still the only one such module readily available to buy online. Since then I've used it many times with reactive loads and for embedding it into old and new equipment
and it does a pretty good job for what it is. There are of course some downsides to it like:
1/ max 20 msec mono impulses can be used. It's an ongoing debate whether 20msec IR are long
enough or you need a 500msec or even 1 sec IR. Some people swear by the longer impulses although
why you would need a 500msec "room colored" IR on stage is beyond me. Anyway people want more msecs
so maybe you should give them more. On the other side if you're recording you can use your PC and DAW to play whatever length IR's you want.
2/ no MIDi switching
3/ the software controlling the module is not "portable". You do what you do with your IRs on your
PC or Mac and after that you can only switch IRs up and down (this by the way is not solved properly either).
This means in live situations you don't have any visual control of what's going on neither you can change anything once IRs are loaded.
Because of 1/-3/ I had to add an external uCU (somebody wrote the code for me) that would do MIDI, up and down button switching and a double digit 7 segment LED display (kind of retro but simple).
From what I see Mark's DSP board is more powerful than that so maybe if these features (together with a small OLED display showing the active impulse number AND name) are included in a board version that would be a dedicated IR player I'm positive that it can become more popular. By "dedicated IR player" I mean channeling some of the current board capabilities for longer IRs.
