DP could be the first to DSD multitrack

[mikehalloran]

Seems to me that if they are shooting for making it equal to digital audio we can currently record (24/96K), they are shooting in the wrong direction. It has to utterly kick the ass of PCM/CD/DVD, or there is no reason to pursue it. They need to set their standards about 4 times as high as they are, if not 40 times higher. Yeah, yeah, unnecessary information exceeds the storage capacity, etc., and yet if there are any improvements to be made over CD or DVD, that's where those improvements lie

I agree. The search for a truly transparent recording technology that can be an absolute sonic mirror of the original is a quest that should not be abandoned.

So... it could help push actual sales of discs....

Then it will be widely adopted instead of being an edge of the fringe with less market share than vinyl these days.

Unlikely. MOTU is a small company with little R&D budget. Whoever tackles this has got to have either a large budget for research with no immediate rewards in sight, or else a lot of time (and money) to devote to a hobby that one day might prove to overthrow the dominant technology in the audio field, or both. None of these sound like MOTU. When someone comes up with a new dominant technology, that's when we'll see MOTU produce a reasonably-priced line of hardware with modest to advanced features for professional audio engineers, not for acoustic scientists. They just aren't positioned to be the leaders in this field.

Uh oh... You just drifted back on topic.

Yes, I agree. No DAW has gone there. Until there's a market demand, I don't think it's ready for prime time.

In addition, there may be some serious licensing issues for the first one that goes there. Frankly, I'm not ready to shoulder my share of that burden as part of the upgrade price.

[supersonic]

There will always be a place for a premium products few will pay for. SACD will probably live on

[James Steele]

Following this thread, but my head hurts now from reading the technical stuff. So what's the verdict? Does DP suck now since it does not support DSD? (Along with Logic, PT, Cubase, Studio One...) Whoever comes up with this first needs to release it for Linux to be sure that it's extra geeky and esoteric.

[Timeline]

Mike, I highly respect your opinion but think for a moment. If all formats were available as most are now, what would it be a financial burden ad require big upgrade prices? Motu would see sales improve from their IO's and would not have to make it unaffordable with DP. As far as those wanting disks in DSD or DXD they would have to pay for it. Its just another option for our music like 5.1.

No Steele, chill. DP is just fine and nobody is dissing them and in fact I'm encouraging them...

[James Steele]

No Steele, chill. DP is just fine and nobody is dissing them and in fact I'm encouraging them...

Did you miss my smiley? We're all expressing our opinions so I'll express mine. I think it's largely academic and pointless and the benefits just aren't worth the expense and effort to a company like MOTU. Shooshie broke it down more effectively than I did.

[mikehalloran]

Whoever comes up with this first needs to release it for Linux to be sure that it's extra geeky and esoteric.

Linux users pay for licensing the technology? That's a non-starter.

Mike, I highly respect your opinion but think for a moment. If all formats were available as most are now, what would it be a financial burden ad require big upgrade prices? .

Oh yes. Absolutely. I license intellectual property for a living and have since 1996.

Anyway, before any DAW is released, there is another major expense. Someone (or many) would have to rewrite the plugins that engineers like to use. Don't no one be holding his/her breath for that to happen any time soon.

The first company to do it will either be Sony, Avid or one that doesn't exist yet. Sony since they hold most of the cards already and really want to push it beyond the fringe where it has been since the beginning (could involve a license deal with Gibson/Tascam as the hardware has already), Avid because the movie industry wants it – you know, the one that has settled on 96/24 as the ultimate release format. A new player with venture capital is a possibility.

You read it here first.

[James Steele]

....Avid because the movie industry wants it – you know, the one that has settled on 96/24 as the ultimate release format. A new player with venture capital is a possibility.

You read it here first.

Maybe Avid... they can add a new tier: Pro Tools SHD. That's going to be one heavy duty annual subscription plan.

[Timeline]

....Avid because the movie industry wants it – you know, the one that has settled on 96/24 as the ultimate release format. A new player with venture capital is a possibility.

You read it here first.

Maybe Avid... they can add a new tier: Pro Tools SHD. That's going to be one heavy duty annual subscription plan.

Like!

[mikehalloran]

My money is on Sony through Tascam. If Gibson sees a profit on the hardware, they might be stupid enough to go for it. After all, it's an opportunity to lose a lot of money and Gibson seems to be like Roger Rabbit in that regards.


Shave and a haircut... One BIT!!!!!!

[Timeline]

Brilliant Mike!

[Robert Randolph]

There are arguments to be made about DSD's quality.

Robert, you seem like someone I could ask the following question, which is not related to anything we've discussed so far. Do you think it's accurate to call a one-bit PCM a "digital" process? If my understanding of one bit pulse modulation is correct, we're talking about a more-or-less analog cluster of pulses, approximating a representation of the density of air molecules passing a microphone's diaphragm. Compared to 16, 24, or 32 bit processing, this is a whole different way of representing sound, yet they are still running on digital machines. Different, in the sense that DSD is a stream of information entirely on the time-axis, with zero usable information on the amplitude or value axis. It actually LOOKS more like analog, but a system must be created that gates voltage changes based on the mathematical relationship of the spacing of pulses over the lattice of the sampled clock. It's Frequency Modulation, isn't it?

When processing the digital audio with which we are all familiar, the number of possible values (bit depth) of each sample determine the subtlety of the analog sound that results from it. The stream is compounding value/time. When processing DSD, all samples have the same value – 1 bit. No other value is possible. It's a flat system, so the only variable is the timing between them, which is measured with a digital clock. Assuming the clocks of the recording, mixing, mastering, and playback machines are corrected for jitter and noise, the resulting analog output should be very precise, comparable to 24 bit/96K digital audio, but not directly translatable on a 1-to-1 basis. Each is an approximation of the other, because of the complete and utter difference of their respective foundations. But we call the PCM of compact discs "digital" technology, even though it deals with hexadecimal codes over 8-bit bytes, linked into 16, 24 or 32 bit words. DSD has no words. No values other than binary on/off.

In DSD applications, everything must be built from the ground up. Filters, AD/DA convertors, multi-core processing, signal transmission within the operating system... virtually everything must be built on a new foundation, where all processes are time-based-only, and not value/time as we currently use. And while the values are all the same, which is to say, binary, the process becomes one of time, error correction for jitter, over the constant oscillations of the various cores of a CPU. I guess that still makes it digital, even though it looks a lot like analog.

It's like the difference between AM and FM radio, except that it is stored with clock information rather than pulled out of the air in real time. The more i think of it, the more I see a universe of approximations in the disparity of overlaying such differing systems one atop another. And yet I guess it's all digital, simply because it is recorded and played back on digital computers. It's really a binary function, such that translation into the digital domain and back is really an extra set of steps and approximations. Geez!

Mind benders. Claude Shannon would love it.

Shoosh

You're a bit off...

I was writing a longer post, but your misunderstanding seems to hinge on one simple thing: 1-bit means there's two values. On and Off. You seem to understand this, but make some odd assumptions about it, so maybe I'm wrong about what you're missing.

The 1-bit signal is a direct representation of the audio, but with significant high-frequency information (we're back to what square waves are!). You could mostly just take that 1-bit audio stream and low-pass it to get the original signal. This isn't that different from PCM with it's 'jagged edges'! When you low-pass it, these harmonically rich structures disappear.

Of course this doesn't matter much any way, since 1-bit streams are old technology.

[Robert Randolph]

I just hope that a cool company like MOTU might get into improving the industry for us on a system like DP that we all love and MOTU profit from the format with IOs.

Unlikely. MOTU is a small company with little R&D budget. Whoever tackles this has got to have either a large budget for research with no immediate rewards in sight, or else a lot of time (and money) to devote to a hobby that one day might prove to overthrow the dominant technology in the audio field, or both. None of these sound like MOTU. When someone comes up with a new dominant technology, that's when we'll see MOTU produce a reasonably-priced line of hardware with modest to advanced features for professional audio engineers, not for acoustic scientists. They just aren't positioned to be the leaders in this field.

Shoosh

Well S, I see it differently. I see no reason at all to overthrow anything but just add the format like the workstation company I posted earlier who implement VST files to work. DP handles various formats now and if they added DSD with a block of code that signifies a compatible IO then we could get there. Glass half full.

It's not that easy. Either MOTU would be required to pay licensing fees, or create their own new format like Merging Technologies did. Both options are pretty silly.

You must also remember that if you're interfacing with VSTs, you are converting back to PCM (at very high sample rates, DXD is 24/384 iirc?). In fact, as far as I know, all products that do processing of DSD formats convert to PCM then back.

Despite any of these things, I still see artists struggling to sell music as anything but MP3s. Vinyl sells for some genres, but CDs are pretty much dead and I don't even know a single layman who knows that DSD exists. Seems like a lot of effort for a very tiny audience.

[Timeline]

I don't understand. If the company I linked can sell a workstation multitrack system complete for $999 plus $199 for a playback system IO. Where would the prohibitive royalties come in?

Also back to your other comment about old Technology. The wire recorder was pre the tape based technology created by the Germans so why would revamping PCM be any different and if thats old, then whats new then?

I think there is some missing research here and I will do my best to look more into it as this was my first post on the subject. Thanks for your input too Robert. I hope is doable until I hear from a coder at MOTU that it isn't.

IF this small company, (MOTU), that manufactures IO's almost monthly and even video related products plus MIDI, can't do research then these products seem to say different. I think they do allot of it and do it well. I'm sure they have considered this and would like to hear from them as to their opinion on the difficulty of the task of side by side implementation in DP. I'm looking for some answers and I don't claim to have but a few. One of them is DSD sounds nice to me and more towards music sound. Glass half full.

[Robert Randolph]

I don't understand. If the company I linked can sell a workstation multitrack system complete for $999 plus $199 for a playback system IO. Where would the prohibitive royalties come in?

That's almost 3x the cost of DP, so I'm sure they are there somewhere. Even if we assume that's incorrect, there's still the cost of developing at technology that neither the majority of producers or end users are interested in.

Also back to your other comment about old Technology. The wire recorder was pre the tape based technology created by the Germans so why would revamping PCM be any different and if thats old, then whats new then?

I'm saying that 1-bit DSD is old. There are newer multibit DSD technologies that are newer. For instance, implementing DXD wouldn't be too difficult assuming no licensing costs.

[Timeline]

OK so you mean 64 bit Robert? Thats cool but I have asked for that of MOTU for a while as well as interim SR format support which my RME allows but DP crashes on. SR127 for instance.
Added: I misunderstood Robert sorry DXD.
No fix yet but possibly they don't want to fully support another companies IO features. I'm sure they could easilly though. To improve sound is important to many. Maybe the DSD is too much of a sea change but DSD 64,128 and 256 would be nice.

If you count the upgrade costs we have paid on DP over the years since inception, it is more than a grand. I know we pay these upgrade costs to help MOTU research and feature implementation so I'm not complaining. I'll continue to pay up as always. The new buyers get the $500 buck price new but will add in to the total upgrade $$ too and pay more over time like us. It all makes sense to me.