[geeks] digicam envy

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 10:27:05AM -0400, Tim H. wrote:

> I have a cousin who does professional audio, and a while ago he said
> there was a lot of noise from the pro audio companies about firewire
> studio equipment, basically everything between the mixing board and the
> master media connected via firewire.  Since a lot of the big studio
> boards have already been replaced by black boxes with PCs hooked to them
> it seems a logical progression. I don't know how much of that has really
> made it into the studio though.

I think TASCAM might have something...

MOTU definately does.  The 828 connects to a machine via firewire and
offers 8 chanels of ADAT optical (unclear if they mean 8 optical
connectors for I believe it is 32 chanels, or 8 chanels of audio via 2
connectors. Adat optical is four chanels of audio, right?).  S/PDIF.
8 chanels of analog audio.  Mic pres.  ADAT sync.

However, the device I was thinking of looked like a mini mixing
console (or multitrack recording deck) that had 1+ DSPs, and could
handle audio on its own, or spit it back via firewire to a host PC or
mac.  But, I'm not going to take the time to keep looking.
 
> The performance guys (concert and live stuff) have really resisted
> computerization, because the studio approach has been either virtual
> controls via monitor and mouse, or a small set of mechanical controls
> which you page across all the virtual channels, and the live guys don't
> want to give up their hundreds of knobs and the response time they
> allow.

I wouldn't put up with it either.  
 
> Apparently now for road gigs a lot of the big groups have all the
> equipment up front with the speakers and amp racks, and have ethernet
> back to a full mixing console.  That has to be weird for the old guys,
> who are used to gazillions of wires snaked back to the mix station, now
> they just have a couple little wires.

Does it digitize all the audio and send it back, or is it digitizing
the controls and sending the control information to the front where it
controls a completely analog bit stream.  I would have thought that
live people would still be sticklers for keeping everything analog as
much as possible to prevent any possibility of clipping.  Personally,
in theory I'm a fan of making all initial recordings in analog, and
then digitizing.  But that is only an option really for people with a
lot of money.  I wish someone would find a way to record digitally but
without ever clipping.  Like a box that sits in front of the digitizer
and generally compresses everything to fit in only 20 bits, but under
extreme overload would start using the additional 4 bits.  Or better
yet, write software that abandons the current tech and works natively
with a 1bit sigma delta stream, if I understand that correctly.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd