MOTUnation.com

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

Timeline wrote: So... it could help push actual sales of discs....

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.

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

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

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? .

mikehalloran wrote:....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 wrote:

mikehalloran wrote:....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.

Shooshie wrote:

Robert Randolph wrote: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

Timeline wrote:

Shooshie wrote:

Timeline wrote: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.

Timeline wrote: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?