San Francisco (October 1, 2008)--The ATR Magnetics/Endless Analog booth (1410) at the 125th Audio Engineering Society Convention will be the site for the world debut of CLASP: the Closed Loop Analog Signal Processor.

Endless Analog President Chris Estes unveiled CLASP to a standing room-only crowd at a meeting of the AES Nashville Section, held at Ocean Way Studios Nashville in August.

The two basic components of the CLASP system are a hardware interface and companion VST plug-ins. Rather than making analog connections directly to the A/D converters feeding the DAW, the signals are first connected to CLASP, which is interfaced with an analog tape machine. When a track is armed inside the DAW, the VST plug-in automatically sends track-arming and transport control information to the tape machine through the CLASP hardware. The engineer works inside the DAW as normal, operationally ignoring the tape machine.

When any DAW track is armed, pressing "play" on the DAW rolls the tape machine, and when "record" is punched in, all tracks on the tape machine enter record. Armed tracks are recorded on tape and the playback head signal is then immediately fed to and recorded by the DAW through the CLASP plug-ins. "The plug-ins," says Estes, "display tape control settings such as remaining tape time while synchronizing the incoming analog tape audio stream using SST (sample sync technology)."

A direct path through CLASP hardware allows zero-latency monitoring. "If you're using a digital console," says Estes, "or even a digital headphone distribution system, those devices always have some sort of inherent latency that they introduce to [the signal path] and everybody just kind of deals with it. With CLASP, you can specify these additional devices, and it'll compensate for them as well."

Endless Analog
www.endlessanalog.com