New in stock at Sweetwater Sound: Digidesign’s new 1622I/O interface has arrived. Finally there is an affordable answer for Pro Tools customers who need many more inputs in their system than outputs. The $1595 (retail price) interface provides 16 balanced TRS inputs and two balanced TRS outputs, plus S/PDIF I/O. It also includes software programmable gain controls that are remembered so you can more easily interface it with the wide variety of “line level” gear out there.
Consumer electronics manufacturers Panasonic, Technics, JVC and Pioneer have given in to pressure from the music industry, and postponed the introduction of DVD-Audio hardware by at least six months. In early October, a Norwegian hacker broke the DVD format’s CSS copy protection scheme, and released the cracking code (known as DeCSS) on the Internet. The music industry says it’s now too easy for crackers to copy DVD-Audio tracks and redistribute them illegally.
Cycling ’74 has released version 2.0 of Pluggo, their collection of 74 audio plug-ins. Version 2.0 ads MAS (MOTU Audio System) support plus MIDI and host synchronization support.