AES Report – Part 4
Welcome back to continued coverage of the 107th AES show.
GIBSON
Normally you wouldn’t think of Gibson as a company who would have a presence at the AES show. Not that there isn’t some “engineering” going on in guitar design, but we pretty much only think of Gibson in terms of musical instruments. But they claim they are going to change the face of the music industry with a new development called GMICS (Global Musical Instrument Communication Standard). GMICS is a new connectivity standard capable of carrying 16 bi-directional, 24-bit, 96 kHz audio channels on one standard Cat-5 type Ethernet cable. Basically it creates a network for musical instrument audio connectivity. In addition, GMICS offers high-bandwidth control and data throughput, enabling on-instrument control of amplifiers, levels and more. They plan to license the technology in component form to the entire industry and claim to have many supporters at the manufacturing level already. It sounds like a really cool thing, but I have to tell you I was still shocked when they showed me a Les Paul guitar with an Ethernet connection on it. This could really be a big thing if it catches on.
ROLAND
Roland’s VSR-880 threw us a twist. It’s a 2 space rackmount studio recorder that’s based on the design of their acclaimed VS-880 and VS-880EX digital workstations. The VSR-880 seems destined to take a place among Roland’s other groundbreakers. The VSR-880 is an 8-track rackmount hard disk recorder based on Roland’s V-Studio technology. It features high-quality, 24-bit converters, 128 Virtual Tracks, optional COSM-based effects and Roland’s R-BUS port for expanded I/O possibilities and interfacing with select V-series mixers.
For use with that R-BUS port is the new ADA-7000, an 8-channel A/D-D/A converter for connecting with the VM-7100/7200, VM-3100Pro or the above VSR-880. It supplies you with eight additional channels of analog I/O with 24-bit conversion. Remote operation is possible from the VM-C7100/7200 V-Mixing Consoles. Finally, Roland unveiled their AE-7000, an interface box for use with digital devices conforming to 4-route (8-channel) AES/EBU standards – and yes, that does mean Pro Tools, among others. This lets such digital devices connect with Roland’s R-BUS technology, found on select V-Mixers and on the VSR-880 Digital Studio Recorder.
BITHEADZ
Not exactly a new product, BitHeadz’s announcement that they would be one of the first software synthesizer companies to implement support for Digidesign’s new “DirectConnect” technology for Pro Tools was certainly news. With the DirectConnect technology, the main stereo mix and all 16 MIDI channel mixes from BitHeadz’s Unity DS-1 Sampler and the Retro AS-1 Synthesizer can be routed directly into Pro Tools.
With the Unity DS-1 and the Retro AS-1 you can route up to 32 streams of audio to the TDM bus. In Pro Tools, you can create stereo or mono auxiliary tracks and assign the outputs from individual Unity or Retro MIDI channels to these tracks. A “Main Out” is also provided giving a combined stereo output from all of the MIDI channels that are not assigned individually. BitHeadz also has plans to add DirectConnect compatibility to their other software instruments, Voodoo MIDI Drums, and Black & Whites Virtual Piano.
MACKIE DESIGNS
The big buzz at Mackie was centered around their new hard disk recorder. In true Mackie style of clever naming, it was referred to as the HDR. The HDR is a rack mount 24-track capable, 24-bit, up to 96k recorder (12 tracks at 96k). It records to inexpensive Ultra DMA drives for which there is a removable drive bay. Or you can put an internal drive in it and use the bay for a DVD RAM drive or something. By the time this machine hits the streets, a 20 gig Ultra DMA will be under $180. You can get almost 90 minutes of 24-track audio on a 20-gig drive. Now let’s do some math. A reel of 2″ tape which holds nearly 30 minutes of audio (at 15 IPS) costs about $125.90 minutes worth of this tape would therefore be $375. You can see that it’s actually cheaper to record on these hard drives than tape, even if you just throw the hard drives away or put them on a shelf afterwards. It’s not quite as cheap to operate as the SVHS format, but it isn’t far off and there are a number of advantages. Obviously a SCSI hard drive that would hold this much audio is much more than $180 so the HDR really looks like it will be inexpensive to operate. Much like their popular D8b digital mixing board, the HDR is built around a computer chassis so all software is proprietary and built right in. Just connect a computer monitor, keyboard, and mouse and you’re all set. Editing is very intuitive and reasonably powerful. One cool feature is that each track has eight dedicated virtual tracks so it’s very easy to quickly do multiple takes (they can all be done to one track) and then comp them together. There’s a lot of that kind of intuitive functionality throughout the software, but you don’t need to have the monitor hooked up to operate the machine. It has front panel controls to take care of all the basic functions. Price is expected to be in the range of $5000, but Mackie really didn’t seem to know yet. Delivery will not be until well into next year so don’t hold your breath on this one.
Almost overshadowed by the HDR was Mackie’s promised 3.0 upgrade to the D8b software. Remember, they have promised an upgrade every six months, and this is month 18 since it was first shipped. 3.0 ads a revamped Fat Channel with many new parameters displayed. They’ve also created a surround view, which is basically the surround pan position of every channel. This pretty much looks like some kind of crazy video game when running, but provides a handy look at the overall surround picture at a glance. They’ve announced support of several great plug-ins including a Massenberg EQ, Antares Auto Tune, TC Works, and a Drawmer plug. This mixer has really come of age now and is taking its place as a standard much like what Mackie created with the original analog 8-bus boards.
TANNOY
They are releasing a new low cost monitor solution in the Proto-J, which will retail for a mere $229 per pair. There will also be a 5.1 surround package available that includes their 10″ sub for $995. Even if you didn’t want it for your studio I would certainly buy this before running down to Circuit City to outfit my entertainment system.
APHEX
Aphex quieted the crowd with their new 1100 two-channel discrete Class-A preamp. The $2000 single space unit looks beautiful, more attractive than any ad or picture will be able to convey. It sports an EIN of -137 dB (shorted) and has a 24-bit digital out with sampling rates up to 96k. They are expecting to ship them by the end of the year.
MARANTZ
Three new professional CD players are coming from Marantz. The 330 ($499), 331 ($629), and 340 ($799) all have new very cool looking backlit displays, including illuminated buttons and switches. These would be great in an environment without much light because it’s easy to see where every function is at a glance. The three models have varying levels of professional features as you move up through the line, with the 240 including XLR balanced I/O, digital out, and the ability to read raw index points off of unfinished CDR disks.
MARK OF THE UNICORN
MOTU stunned us with yet another computer interface for hard disk recording. The 24i brings 24 high quality 24-bit analog inputs to the table. All are on balanced +4dBu TRS connectors delivering a dynamic range of 111 dB. The core system is $1495 while the expander is $1195. This rounds out the whole 2408 family of products. You can now get in or out of your system just about any way you want through some combination of the four available interfaces. This is very cool stuff.
They also unveiled a new version of Digital Performer that is going to take advantage of a feature that they’ve been clandestinely shipping in all of their USB interfaces for a while. MTS (MIDI Time Stamping) is a protocol that allows them to actually give a unique time stamp to each MIDI message, which they claim will bring their real world MIDI timing accuracy to within 1/3 of a millisecond. As part of this implementation they now let you choose any tick resolution up to 10,000 ticks (and it’ll do 20,000 chiggers) per quarter note. They’ve also added a great new drum editor with grid based editing, plug-in automation, and several new plug-ins including the new Antares mic modeler. All of this is supposed to be available in October.
WAVES
Among the cool hard and software at the Waves booth were three interesting new items. The first was the C4 ($575), a Multiband Parametric Processor with four-band dynamic EQ, for use with TDM/Mix systems. It features 48-bit resolution, phase-compensated crossovers, completely independent threshold, attack release, gain and compressive range for each band. This is the first of what will be a whole series of new Master Series plug-ins from Waves. They are pulling out all the stops on these and making an extremely high quality product. Next up was their Doppler effect, which features control of all phases of the process including start and end point. Other features include Listening position, Auto-Trigger, Manual-Trigger, Tracking model, acceleration, reverb, etc. The Enigma promises to be pretty exciting. They’ve taken the stereozation from their PS22 plug-in and combined it with phaser-like notch filter networks; feedback looping with early reflection techniques; and LFO modulations and band-limiting filtering on the notch processor. It produces these unique phaser/chorus effects but isn’t really classifiable as a phaser or chorus effect, if you know what I mean. You just have to hear this one.