Is The Eventide H9000 Worth $7,000?

hey welcome to my honest review of the most expensive effects processor money can buy quite possibly the most expensive effects processor in the history of mankind the eventide h9000 and because of its seven thousand dollar price tag this might inevitably feel like i am seeing if i can justify the h9000 and it is important to me to not normalize or ignore the high price tag i realize that the vast majority of my viewers will never want to spend this much money on any piece of music gear but might be curious as to what lies on the other side of the high cost of admission so full disclosure i am not being paid anything to make this video and to make it as objective as possible i am not working directly with eventide or getting the unit for free if you don't see this on my channel or in the studio in the future that means that i've decided to send it back to perfect circuit rather than buying it at a small discount that being said for the one person who watches this video and decides that they do want to spend seven thousand dollars on h9000 use the link below i will probably get some red lobster if you do that anyway now that that's out of the way let's roll the intro that is the intro for the wrong channel can we roll the ben and gear one please thank you what is the h9000 and why is it so special well it is a really powerful rack unit effects processor that can run up to 16 even-tied algorithms simultaneously even tide's algorithms are not really the same as for example just a reverb algorithm some of them have multiple effects bundled together the h9 max here can run one channel simultaneously and that costs 800 bucks and if you were to daisy chain 16 of these you'd spend 11 200 and you'd also be really confused all the time so why in the world would you want to run 16 algorithms anyway well because maybe you have a whole lot of channels and the h9000 has 10 channels of analog in and out and 8 channels of optical adat it's also worth noting that there are a lot of even tied algorithms that are exclusive to the h9000 but most of them are utilizing the increased amount of outputs for things like surround sound reverb finally if you use the h9000 as a usb audio interface you'll get 16 digital channels that's right the h9000 can also be your audio interface if you don't mind sacrificing microphone or high z inputs but to be honest the performance and driver made me quickly switch back to my rme fireface 802. i'm going to be honest with you about my experience i spent an entire day trying to set up a digital connection through both aes and adat between my interface and the h9000 and eventually gave up and just went analog i'd frequently have to jump through all sorts of weird hoops like turning my rme off and on again and then changing the sample rate in a particular order once i did get it working if something crashed or hiccuped or if i had to reboot the computer i'd have to start the entire process over again and this could be because of windows 10 or my particular interface and if i bought this i would definitely spend another day or two troubleshooting it and probably sort it out but since it's a loaner unit i just went analog but it was still a bit of a bummer i do have a very modular studio setup though i switch things around a lot not only because i get sent things for this channel but because i'm one of those people who typically is more creative with fresh workflows the h9000m feels a bit more at home in the type of recording studio where everything stays powered on with hardwired inputs and you have the same interface with the same sample rate you set up the routing once and then you're good to go one huge pleasant surprise was the emote software both the plugin and the desktop versions which communicate with h9000 through a lan network cable or wi-fi it has an easy to grasp ui and is just about flawless functionally i should also point out that if you don't really care about the physical screen and if you are okay with using emote and trust that event will continue to update the software which i do then you can get the boring looking h9000r with the exact same functionality for two thousand dollars less another thing a lot of people on the internet compare the h9000 to the axe effects or similar things i really want to try out max effects in the future but these are not substitutes for one another at all if you want multiple even tight algorithms in a guitar rack then the eclipse for example is effectively the exact same solution with less channels seven thousand dollars is an insane amount of money to pay for any piece of gear but if you're buying a rack unit designed to run the effects for an entire studio and using it like an effects pedal then you're simply wasting your money we are obviously not going to cover all 1600 algorithms today but despite this being the deepest rabbit hole one could fall down in the world of effects even tai did a really outstanding job at making it simple and manageable so let's start with the software and hear this thing already what you're looking at right now is called emote it is the software controller for the h9000 that connects via ethernet either a cable or it comes with a wi-fi adapter as well and emote basically allows you to i guess it's kind of a shortcut to do everything that you could do on the unit 90 of my time with the h9000 has been in emote in fact emote is so convenient that i haven't even really touched the interface of the h9000 all that much except to just explore around and look at the screen so we'll be hanging out here for most of this video and i want to show you v-sig v-sig is the algorithm designer for the h-9000 and the previous versions like h8000 h7000 and so on and you can just download algorithms from the actual hardware unit so i'm going to search for black hole there it is and here it is as you can see we have some diffused choruses anything pink is a knob or a menu page or something like that some sort of interface item uh these are the adc outs adc ends now as much as i wish that i could just double click these and see the insides of the black hole algorithm in its entirety uh that's probably even tide's most valuable intellectual property and they're not just gonna give that to us which is understandable but this is vsig it is a very important part of owning the h9000 if you like diving as deep as i do and i thought that i should just show it to you i am going to try and make an algorithm or two for the h9000 using this and i may just have it as like a patreon-only stream or something like that because it's going to take a really long time and it's going to be a little bit too boring for your standard youtube video so in the meantime let's keep our deep diving with emote so this here patch i just have a monophonic guitar input coming into analog 2 which is being spread out to stereo distortion then being mapped over this way to the resonator which i kind of made a custom patch for and then that's going into a quad mixer and then to the output and then the other output of the stereo distortion is going into a tape drone and uh kind of sounds like this [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so after noodling around a bit with my guitar and kalimba i really wanted to run my modular through an ad into the optical inputs then using the h9000 as a da to run all seven channels to analog stereo to see how much better i can make a social generative patch sound by dragging and dropping some algorithms into the signal chain i'm not even speaking english at this point ben won't run more than two channels at same time [Music] so [Music] well see now imagining this as a permanent end of chain for my entire modular setup makes the price seem a lot more reasonable oh man especially if i were to have a midi knob controller controlling the midi parameters on the event algorithms that patch wasn't even that good and now i'm officially on the fence over buying this thing black hole is arguably eventide's most famous reverb and i wondered to myself if it sounded the same across some of their other offerings so i decided to test the algorithm on the h9000 the h9 and the blackhole vst plugin [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] i think that i like the vst plug-in the best but i also think that the knob values weren't calibrated because the decay extended much farther than it did on the hardware units so after about 16 days of playing with h9000 for some time every single day here's my take the price tag stresses me out here's an example of what i mean in 2016 the biggest splurge on gear of my life was a sony a7r ii and a bunch of really nice lenses for it the a7r ii is a 3200 dollar full-frame camera that at the time had no competitor i used it for everything from album photography to promotional videos to my first two years of this channel and just now five to six years later am i only just considering an upgrade that to me is a worthy investment and at the end of the day it is an amazing piece of gear that inspired me to make a lot of art but if you saw me on tour at any point since i got it you saw a camera bag tightly tethered to my body if i was performing it'd be right next to me on stage why because that bag was a single small extremely expensive thing that would be easy to run away with and that made me paranoid and subsequently stressed me the out so yeah sure my modular rack or my disclosure piano is worth a lot more than the h9000 but good luck lifting either of them much less sneaking them out of my studio so obviously the h9000 made the most sense when i put various channels from my modular through it it legitimately turned something i'd normally unplug and walk away from into something that sounded extraordinary now on the other hand i could have simply mapped the modular to my audio interface and then run the channels through vst effects like let's say melda's m complete bundle but that's twenty five hundred dollars worth of plugins on a two thousand dollar interface on a computer that costs well let's just say that all this adds up to over seven thousand dollars if you like eventide's algorithms which there are a whole lot of and think you'd enjoy the workflow of vcig to create your own this could probably exist as the primary effects in your studio for eight to ten years before needing an upgrade and for that the price is not that unreasonable but i think personally i would not buy the 7 000 h 9000 over the 5 000 h9000r i just don't think that the screen which is not a touchscreen by the way is worth the 2 000 premium i might be stretching here but considering that the unit can be accessed via wi-fi i think the only reason the emote software isn't available on ios or android is because mounting an ipad mini to the front of the h9000r would provide an improved experience that saves about 1500 bucks i'm assuming this because the h9 app works extremely well on both my ipad and my android phone i think that's where i'll leave this in my opinion i think that the h9000r with ios or android control connectivity is worth every cent of five thousand dollars the ball's in your court even tied if you like this video subscribe to my channel if there's anything you want me to cover in the future let me know in the comments if you want access to a large discord community with everything from music making challenges to game servers and if you want access to audio assets and unreleased music that you hear on this channel and even unreleased music that you don't hear on this channel then my patreon is for you and you could join our amazing community for as little as a dollar all right that's it bye

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 17,520

Rating: 4.9271846 out of 5

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Id: cZOMiXz51pc

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021