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Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 92053, member: 2178"] Spectrus gives its Amp and Amp Lab modules five quality tiers, while fresh instances now open on Ultra Eco instead of the full High model. High adds about 11 ms of reported processing latency, whereas Balanced and Eco stay near zero, which makes the quality control a practical tracking decision rather than a cosmetic preference. The [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/morphulus-has-expanded-spectrus-with-nam-and-eight-slots.77438/']Spectrus amp quality controls[/URL][/B] run from High through Balanced, Eco, Super Eco, and Ultra Eco. Spectrus describes each tier as separately voiced instead of a full model with pieces simply chopped away, so moving down the scale is meant to preserve the basic character while asking less from the processor. Fresh instances starting on Ultra Eco change the normal setup routine. You no longer need to lower quality just to build a large rack without an early CPU spike, and you can decide later which amp stages deserve more processing once the session is stable. [HEADING=2]High quality is a mixing choice as much as a sound choice[/HEADING] High is the full amp model and the only tier Spectrus documents with roughly 11 ms of added processing latency. Your DAW receives that delay value and compensates for it during playback, but compensation does not make live monitoring feel immediate when your guitar is passing through the plugin in real time. Balanced and Eco are documented as near-zero latency modes. For recording, either can make more sense than High even on a powerful machine because the problem is no longer whether the computer can calculate the model, but how long the monitored signal takes to come back through the chain. Super Eco and Ultra Eco sit below Eco for sessions where instance count matters more. Spectrus does not publish a fixed CPU percentage for any tier, so claims such as half the load or twice as many amps would be guesswork. The useful promise is narrower and more believable, with each lower tier intended to make multiple amp instances easier on modest hardware. The broader pressure behind [B][URL='https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10086']pruned real-time neural amp models[/URL][/B] is the same one musicians hit in large sessions. Amp modeling can become expensive enough that reducing computation is what makes low-latency deployment practical. Spectrus does not say its five tiers use pruning, so there is no reason to assume the internal method is identical. [HEADING=2]Quality changes are setup moves rather than automation tricks[/HEADING] Changing tiers can produce a soft click because the plugin reports a different latency and the host has to realign timing. Spectrus therefore keeps the Quality control non-automatable. A verse-to-chorus quality jump might look clever on paper, but the control is deliberately designed for configuration rather than performance. The safest workflow is to choose the tier before recording a pass and leave it there. If High is wanted for final playback, change it after tracking or while transport is stopped, then give the DAW a moment to settle its delay compensation before making timing judgments. A session with several Amp or Amp Lab modules does not need one global quality rule. Keep a foreground guitar on High when the added latency no longer matters, while background layers can stay on Eco, Super Eco, or Ultra Eco if they are already doing their job. Per-instance quality lets CPU go where you can actually hear a reason to spend it. Amp Lab follows the same five-tier system and the same latency behavior as Amp. This matters because hybrid rigs can multiply quickly when you start pairing different preamp and power sections across several slots, especially alongside cabinets, delays, reverbs, and other processors in the same Spectrus instance. [HEADING=2]Ultra Eco makes more sense when the rack gets crowded[/HEADING] Ultra Eco being the default is easy to misread as a recommendation to leave every amp there forever. It is better understood as a conservative starting point that keeps a new rack light until you decide how much headroom the project really has. CPU trouble often appears late, not when the first amp is inserted. Add parallel paths, another guitar double, oversampling elsewhere in the DAW, a convolution cabinet, and a few lookahead processors, and the margin can disappear quickly. Starting light gives the rest of the project room to grow before crackles or buffer changes force a rebuild. Quality also behaves independently from amp-family loading. Changing an amp family makes Spectrus build the new engine in the background while the current one keeps sounding until the replacement is ready. Changing the Quality tier is different because its latency relationship involves the host, which is why a click can appear even though family changes are designed to avoid an audio gap. For live playing, Balanced or Eco has the clearest documented advantage because both are specifically described as near-zero latency. Super Eco and Ultra Eco become useful when the machine is carrying several amp stages and CPU headroom is thin, while High fits the point where full-model processing matters more than monitoring delay. [/QUOTE]

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