In the article for Production Expert, James Richmond tests his new Eventide H9000 hardware effects processor and gives us his thoughts on the newest addition to his studio.

For most of my working life, I’ve wanted an Eventide Ultraharmonizer. I first saw one sometime in the late ’80s, probably in the guitar rig of Robert Fripp, or one of the metal shredders with refrigerator-sized guitar racks. When I started working in studios and then owning my own I became more familiar with Eventide’s range of Ultraharmonizers, the H3000 has been a studio staple for decades. I found them mesmerising to look at with the numeric keypad- they looked futuristic and retro all at once.

They were also always tantalisingly out of reach, either physically (as I was located in Australia and they didn’t import many) or financially (costing about as much as I earned in a gazillion years in those days). Fast forward to 2021 and I find myself equipped with a flagship model, the H9000, equipped with a Dante expansion card for review.

Hardware

The H9000 comes as a 2U rack, with a slighter cheaper model the H9000R featuring the same hardware but without the front panel. The H9000 represents a significant step forward from the previous model, with a larger, clearer display and much more processing power. The fan-cooled unit featured four quad-core ARM processors on removable cards, potentially allowing for upgrades as faster processors become available. The rear of the unit features many different IO formats. There are 8 analogue channels on DB25 connectors, a stereo analogue pair on XLR, 8 channels of AES on DB25, as well as a pair of channels on XLR there too. ADAT optical is also supported as is S/PDIF. Additionally, there are three expansion slots that can support Avid’s Digilink, MADI, and Dante, with more formats (AES67 and RAVENNA) mooted too. It has 16 channels of USB too, plus MIDI and world clock.

As my studio is fully equipped for Dante I asked for a Dante expansion to be supplied with the unit. This affords up to 32 channels of Digital IO over a single ethernet cable. That should be enough. For the extremely channel hungry you could load up with three Dante cards for 96 channels of IO.

Installation and Configuration

I like to maintain a silent control room. You might say it is a requirement for me, as I mostly record myself or others in it, eschewing the need for a separate live space. When I first turned on the H9000 and heard the fans spin up I knew I’d have to come up with a solution to place it outside the control room. Don’t get me wrong, for a device of this power the need for active cooling is entirely understandable. Fortunately, the Dante option card in the H9000 means I can place the unit in my machine room rack and plug it into the switch in that room, which also houses the NAS and a few other noisy pieces of the kit. A pair of ethernet cables, one for Dante and another for remote management, where all I need to have the unit show up on the network and get working. 

The unit also ships with a handy wifi dongle if it is physically located away from the network switch. This is for configuration only as Dante does not support wifi. Sample rate support is from 44.1kHz to 96kHz, with the exception of ADAT IO which only operates at 1x sample rates. Once the H9000 showed up on Dante Controller I was able to configure the channels as required. In my studio, I am only going to use it over Dante most of, or perhaps all of, the time so I configured the first 16 channels of Dante to connect to the Avid MTRX, and the second sixteen channels to connect to my native audio interface, a Focusrite Rednet PCIE-r card, which is otherwise using all the same channel inputs as Pro Tools does. 

Rather than relying on the front panel to configure the unit I’ve been using Eventide's own bespoke application called ‘Emote’. With Emote you can configure the H9000 as well as edit presets, which will be discussed later on in this article.

Device Architecture

We finally get to the fun part of the review; the effects. The H9000 has the entirety of the H8000’s effects library plus the Eclipse, H9, and Factor series effects units too, going well beyond the capabilities of the Anthology bundle. This is not a device I’d say you can skip reading the manual entirely. It would be your choice, of course, but the 129-page document is very well written and clearly laid out. It is digital-only, no paper copy is supplied, which makes sense given how upgradeable the unit is and how quickly a paper manual would be made obsolete. 

The device hierarchy is four layers deep with the Session layer at the top. Session presets save the entire state of the device including FX chains parameters and router, physical IO addressed by those chains, and other data.

Below this is the FX Chains that allow you to chain up to four algorithms together in a variety of ways, series/parallel, etc. The audio passes from the input to the FX Chain through to its output through those algorithms. 

The Algorithm layer is the basic blocks or modules of the H9000. The amount of algorithms in the H9000 is simply phenomenal- there are hundreds and hundreds of them, ranging from simple LPF’s to compressors, delay lines, reverbs, pitch effects. Classics such as MicroPitch, Instant Phaser, and the SP2016 Reverb are accounted for as well as more esoteric ones. Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to what ‘2_5.1Onirica Ritmica’ might be? Fortunately, there is a very helpful algorithm manual available to tell you (it says ‘Sides bounce! EQ > Verb > 4v reverse shifters(10 sec) > Ring Modulators. Stereo in, quad out’). Nice!

If the algorithm manual isn’t to hand Emote, via its drag and drop style interface, makes it very easy to audition effects if the manual isn’t to hand, much as you would with DAW plugins. Emote can be instantiated as a plug-in your DAW too, which is very useful.

The final layer is the parameter layer which are individual adjustments that can be made within an FX Chain or an Algorithm.

Any Issues?

The main issue most people are going to come up against with the H9000 is simply ‘where do I begin?’. There is so much in there it can and probably will feel overwhelming. I’ve had the H9000 for several months now and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. The best approach I’ve found is to be ‘task-based’ with my process, splitting activities into creating patches that do specific jobs, rather than endlessly trying out the seemingly inexhaustible amount of algorithms.

The drag and drop nature of Emote is very easy to navigate, much like one would navigate a plugin menu.

The main factor for some could be the fan noise, which is relatively low, but noticeable. As mentioned Dante's expansion allows positioning away from the mix position without needing expensive cabling. Eventide has stated on their forum they wish to provide a software update to allow the fan to run slower, reducing the fan noise. The unit runs quite cool so this shouldn’t be an issue for overheating.

VSig

If the billions (euphemistically speaking) of algorithms are not sufficient for your needs then it is helpful to know that Eventide has provided a development application entitled VSig. It is a graphical programming language, which enables you to build your own, creating effects that have never been built before. The application works not unlike Max, where objects are patched together with cables. VSig is very deep and capable, not unlike the H9000 itself. It is worth checking out this video from AES 2019 which goes into more detail.

Pros

• Incredible range of multi-effects with unbelievable scope, beyond what anything else on the market does.

• All the main connectivity formats are accounted for.

• Future-proofed and highly expandable.

• Sounds terrific.

• V-Sig offers tremendous scope to develop bespoke algorithms.

Cons

• Fan noise, which can be easily mitigated with placement, especially with Dante.

Conclusion

To say I am impressed by the H9000 is a massive understatement. This is a world-class device with a world-class sound. Yes, you will need to spend time with it and no, it isn’t as immediate as using plugins in a DAW. The H9000 will do more than any other effects processor that I know of. I’ve only had a few months with the unit but it has featured on everything I’ve worked on since I got it and I am really loving using it. Since DAW’s took over a lot of high-end hardware effects units, especially multi-effects units, have been discontinued. It is comforting to see so much development being continued by Eventide. The H9000 is a triumph.