Where Are The Audio Demos?

Okay, thanks.  I guess after looking at a few products and seeing nothing I gave up too soon.  The H8000FW vocal pitch shift demos are just the kind of thing I was looking for, and the device sounds very good at that. And that long demo that showed the H8000 doing all kinds of other things was probably the most impressive digital effects demo I've ever heard.

 Thanks.

Yes, there is very little.  Originally I thought the two vocal pitch shift demos were what I wanted to hear, but then realized they have formant correction which also means they are probably using a monophonic pitch shifter and a different algorithm than their general purpose pitch shifting that can be used for polyphonic material.  My TC Electronics Quintet can pitch shift vocals while preserving formants pretty much perfectly.  It's all of my general purpose pitch shifters that can handle any input that sound like crap, with echoes, dropped transits, metallic sounding, discordant, glitches, and so on.  That's why I wanted to hear Eventide's pitch shifting, isolated and with large pitch shifts of up to +/- octave to see how clean it is.  But there's nothing anywhere.

Well that's not quite right.  Pitch shifting that requires pitch detection is meant for monophonic sources, but there are general purpose pitch shifters that can work with any input material because they don't detect pitch.  I'd find it quite odd if a $5000 Eventide effects unit that seems to do everything under the sun, can't do what a $100 guitar pedal or $200 rack unit can (and do it better).  There are all kinds of uses for pitch shifting polyphonic and non-pitched audio in addition to special effects that can be acheived by doing so, like putting pitch shifters in the feedback loops of delays for infinite rise and fall type effects, and such.  I was almost sure some of that kind of stuff had to be going on in that long demo that was showing all kinds of special effects.  But if no Eventide products can do that, then that's a shocker.

 Actually that should read more like, "Real time pitch shifting on Eventide effects units works as described."  In other words, it's monophonic.  That's important to know.  That also affects how it can be used when patched in with other effects.  Overlapping delays, notes, or maybe even reverb tails may confuse the pitch shifter.

 >>Again, pitch shifting works as described. Do you know a realtime
pitch shifter that does transpose a third inversion of an F#7 #5 b9 to
a different root without any artifacts?

Or how could possibly
work a diatonic shifter without understanding the note first…then
transpose it to desired interval in the choosen key/scale?<<

 You're talkiing about a harmonizer.  Harmonizers need to understand the note.  A general purpose pitch shifter doesn't.  It just transposes equal semitone amounts.  For instance if somebody wants their 6 string guitar to sound like a 12 string, they'd have the pitch shifter pitch the sound up an octave, and it always stays at an octave interval.  I use pitch shifters for detuning, massive chorus effects, special effects, and even an all -stops-out pipe organ sound from my synths with up to +/- two octaves of pitch shift in that last application.  Those pitch shifters all work with polyphonic audio coming in.  So as I had said earlier, it looks like no Eventide effects unit can do that simpler kind of pitch shifting which virtually any cheap little effects unit can do.  That's the surprising part because I thought Eventide effects units could do everything anybody else could and a lot more, and since you're known specifically for pitch shifting, I just assumed you could do standard pitch shifting that works with any audio input.

A harmonizer is a pitch shifter, but not all pitch shifters are harmonizers.  You keep saying all pitch shifters use an internal pitch detector, but that doesn't appear to be the case.  Otherwise they couldn't be used for complex chords, complex sounds with no natural harmonic series, or any other fully polyphonic material, without limits.  I can pitch shift an entire orchestral recording and there's no pitch to detect in that.  They just chop the audio up into windows, drop data or duplicate data, stretch or compress the audio in the window, then merge the windows back together.  No pitch detection needed.

I understand that even monophonic pitch shifters can sometimes handle octaves or other notes that fall onto the natural harmonic series of the fundamental just as my two monophonic pitch shifters can.  But as soon as a complex chord comes in they screw up as you say.  But that's not the case with the non-pitch detecting pitch shifters in my effects units by companies such as Roland, Boss, Lexicon, TC Electronics, Behringer, and Digitech.  My Boss SX-700 has 5 non-pitch detecting modes that can handle any kind of input and 3 mono pitch detecting modes for monophonic input, and the user can select whether to detect the pitch of the actual audio that will be pitch shifted or the user can provide another pitch in another channel for the unit to detect.  So I think I know what the differences are.

I have a feeling the reason this keeps going on and on is that you don't want to admit that the Eventide doesn't do something that most other effects units can.  But it's important not to hide or confuse that information, because if I forked out several thousand dollars on an Eventide, only to find out it can't do one of the main things I bought it for, it would probably get boxed up and sent back and I would not be happy.