Death to Cables
Lately I've had a new obsession: ripping cables out of my studio.
This isn't as violent or destructive a process as it sounds. I'm actually taking advantage of a new-ish trend in audio technology, which is consolidating the flow of various types of informational signals in a music studio into one pathway, namely IP over your garden-variety ethernet cables.
In the 80's and 90's, a music studio meant a mass of specialized cables. You had analog audio on quarter-inch or XLR cables, digital audio on RCA or optical cables, multiple keyboards and mouses (or KVM switches to allow connecting input devices to multiple PC's), and of course a nest of the venerable MIDI cords. But with the recent trend towards software-based studios, clever developers have realized that there isn't in principle any need for this kind of diversity anymore, and have started to move all kinds of information flow into ethernet.
So nowadays I send:
-MIDI over IP (goodbye clunky MIDI interfaces with 16 cables per capita)
-Video signals over IP (I have two Dell PC displays appearing in standard Mac OSX windows)
-Keyboard/mouse signals over IP (One keyboard to rule them all! No more switchboxes.)
The final stage is sending digital audio over the network. This is easy enough if you work exclusively on one OS (either OSX or Widnows), but getting PC's to send audio to Macs is currently a tricky affair. But give it a few months, and I bet I'll have an (almost) cable-free studio.
I know that in just a few years' time, what I'm describing here as advances will be things people take for granted. Or that we'll have moved on to audio-via-telepathy, and even IP will seem quaint. But at this point in history it's all pretty exciting.
Anyone need to buy some cables?
This isn't as violent or destructive a process as it sounds. I'm actually taking advantage of a new-ish trend in audio technology, which is consolidating the flow of various types of informational signals in a music studio into one pathway, namely IP over your garden-variety ethernet cables.
In the 80's and 90's, a music studio meant a mass of specialized cables. You had analog audio on quarter-inch or XLR cables, digital audio on RCA or optical cables, multiple keyboards and mouses (or KVM switches to allow connecting input devices to multiple PC's), and of course a nest of the venerable MIDI cords. But with the recent trend towards software-based studios, clever developers have realized that there isn't in principle any need for this kind of diversity anymore, and have started to move all kinds of information flow into ethernet.
So nowadays I send:
-MIDI over IP (goodbye clunky MIDI interfaces with 16 cables per capita)
-Video signals over IP (I have two Dell PC displays appearing in standard Mac OSX windows)
-Keyboard/mouse signals over IP (One keyboard to rule them all! No more switchboxes.)
The final stage is sending digital audio over the network. This is easy enough if you work exclusively on one OS (either OSX or Widnows), but getting PC's to send audio to Macs is currently a tricky affair. But give it a few months, and I bet I'll have an (almost) cable-free studio.
I know that in just a few years' time, what I'm describing here as advances will be things people take for granted. Or that we'll have moved on to audio-via-telepathy, and even IP will seem quaint. But at this point in history it's all pretty exciting.
Anyone need to buy some cables?
1 Comments:
Talk about synchronicity,
I have been selling most of my gear on ebay, due to going the software route, and using firewire/ethernet for the various intercommunication I still need. My laptop is taking over the sounds I need (though I admit I may need to use both laptops in future performances as I get into more synthesis).
I totally love it as the software patchbays/editors are SO much easier, than wrestling with medusa
It's actually a bit annoying remembering how much I spend on cabling and how little cables are worth ($80->$8)
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