Mike Rivers wrote:
> Les Cargill wrote:
>
>> Optical interfaces that do 100BaseTX are commonplace. It's a COTS
>> TOSLINK optical part, or at least the guy's blog said it was.
>
> The guy with the blog, huh? Well, you can belive him, or you can take a
> look at the real data sheet:
> http://www.wavefrontsemi.com/index.p...productdocsoft
>

I don't see any reason to doubt him - he claimed it worked, showed
scope traces.

> Sure, it uses standard Toshiba optical-to-digital parts for the gozintas
> and
> gozoutas,

Which is my point

> but the thing that makes it ADAT Optical (tm) is the Wavefront
> chip. I suppose you could design your own, but for eight bucks (or three
> if you buy enough of them) why bother?
>

Sure, long as it stays available. I thought the problem was that
PCI cards are getting hard to find.

>> I believe Best Buy still sells IDE drives. Probably not 120GB ones.
>
> Nope. 320 GB was the smallest I've seen there. And most of the IDE
> drives left on the shelf are laptop size.
>

Unsurprising.

>> And frankly, that whole thing of restricting to a range of replacement
>> drives didn't make sense, anyway. Poor design. Any RTOS I am familiar
>> with that supports IDE can open the whole drive as a linear sequence
>> of bytes, anyway.
>
> Don't blame the operating system for this one. Blame the motherboard
> manufacturer. The original BIOS could only recognize drives up to 30 GB.

That's irrelevant, Mike. The people who wrote the firmware
for the recorder could have had it boot in a way in which
any drive at all could have been used. I claim this
is a mistake, one that was made years ago and is still
continuing to be made for no good reason.

> I had a home brew computer, a Pentium II with an Intel branded motherboard
> that was like that, only maybe the limit was 8 GB. I was able to use a
> larger
> drive in it with a flash BIOS update. When dealing with hardware that's
> over
> ten years old, you have to cut them some slack. While in theory they
> might have been able to test it with larger drives, there were no larger
> drives,
> so how would they know if it DIDN'T work in the future?
>

Well, you engineer it such that it doesn't *matter* what
size drive is in there. You pull <n> bytes off the start of the disk,
load that into RAM and jump to it. Dunno if LILO or GRUB
were around, but there were plenty of other examples to choose
from. You can boot XP with either LILO or GRUB, and I was
booting '95 and '98 with LILO back around when these recorders
started being available.

Doesn't matter what you call it - it's poor engineering.

>>> How many computers are there ready-to-go that can accommodate an
>>> MFM hard drive? Or even have a real 25-pin or even 9-pin RS-232 port?
>>
>> I've not seen one that is not a laptop that does not have them. But
>> I haven't really looked.
>
> A couple of years ago, I bought a brand new Dell desktop computer with
> nothing but USB ports, but a lot of them, I think eight. When I found that
> I couldn't use it for what I wanted to, I swapped it off for a refurbished
> last year's Dell which had everything I needed and was cheaper. It was
> a Pentium 4 rather than a Core 2 Duo, but I can't say that I know what
> I'm missing.
>

I still use a P4 myself. Seems perfectly fine.

>>> I tried a PCI-e parallel card but it
>>> came out configured as a port that the software didn't recognize.
>
>> Huh. Wrong address, huh? Wonder if it was configurable, like
>> in the BIOS or something?
>
> I haven't seen a highly configurable BIOS for a while. The BIOS
> didn't know about the parallel port on the card as far as I could tell.
> It came out as LPT3 and there was no way I could change it.

Ah.

> It did
> appear that I could make the Wibu key look at LPT3 instead of LPT1
> or 2, but I couldn't get that to work. And of course since it was an
> abandoned product, the only support I could get from Magix was
> to upgrade to the newest version of Sequoia which uses a USB dongle.
>
>
>

In cases like that, I'd be sorely tempted to patch that binary to
make the dongle check go away.

--
Les Cargill

Les Cargill wrote:

>> but the thing that makes it ADAT Optical (tm) is the Wavefront
>> chip. I suppose you could design your own, but for eight bucks (or three
>> if you buy enough of them) why bother?

> Sure, long as it stays available. I thought the problem was that
> PCI cards are getting hard to find.

That's just one problem. Actually it's easy to find one - RME. It's
expensive,
though. And because RME is inclined to build everything themselves, it
might not use the Wavefront chips, though it probably uses the Toshiba
optical assemblies.

The problem is that cheap ADAT to USB interfaces are hard to find. And
that doesn't have anything to do with the availability of parts, it has
everything
to do with the potential market. Apparently no manufacturer thinks it's big
enough to put their time into developing a product.

>> Don't blame the operating system for this one. Blame the motherboard
>> manufacturer. The original BIOS could only recognize drives up to 30 GB.
>
> That's irrelevant, Mike. The people who wrote the firmware
> for the recorder could have had it boot in a way in which
> any drive at all could have been used. I claim this
> is a mistake, one that was made years ago and is still
> continuing to be made for no good reason.

The people who wrote the firmware that has to to with the recorder
booting wasn't Mackie. It was whoever made the motherboard, or
whatever part of the motherboard makes it boot. It's a PC motherboard.
I don't know of any PC motherboard from 1998 that will boot any size
drive. Or any PC operating system, for that matter.

> You can boot XP with either LILO or GRUB, and I was
> booting '95 and '98 with LILO back around when these recorders
> started being available.

Sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about here.

> In cases like that, I'd be sorely tempted to patch that binary to
> make the dongle check go away.

Shall I send you a copy? I don't have any idea how to do that either. I'm
just a user. I buy what works when I need it, and I hope it will work as
long as I need it to work. So far I've been lucky and I'm not going to live
that many more years.

Kids today don't have the attention span to want to keep something
working until the wheels fall off, so that's who the designers are designing
for.


--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be operated without
a passing knowledge of computing, although it seems that it can be
operated without a passing knowledge of audio." - John Watkinson

Mike Rivers wrote:
> Les Cargill wrote:
>
>>> but the thing that makes it ADAT Optical (tm) is the Wavefront
>>> chip. I suppose you could design your own, but for eight bucks (or three
>>> if you buy enough of them) why bother?
>
>> Sure, long as it stays available. I thought the problem was that
>> PCI cards are getting hard to find.
>
> That's just one problem. Actually it's easy to find one - RME. It's
> expensive,
> though. And because RME is inclined to build everything themselves, it
> might not use the Wavefront chips, though it probably uses the Toshiba
> optical assemblies.
>

If I were them, I'd at least start out with the Wavefront, then
look at replacement as a possible cost reduction.

> The problem is that cheap ADAT to USB interfaces are hard to find. And
> that doesn't have anything to do with the availability of parts, it has
> everything
> to do with the potential market. Apparently no manufacturer thinks it's big
> enough to put their time into developing a product.
>

Apparently.

>>> Don't blame the operating system for this one. Blame the motherboard
>>> manufacturer. The original BIOS could only recognize drives up to 30 GB.
>>
>> That's irrelevant, Mike. The people who wrote the firmware
>> for the recorder could have had it boot in a way in which
>> any drive at all could have been used. I claim this
>> is a mistake, one that was made years ago and is still
>> continuing to be made for no good reason.
>
> The people who wrote the firmware that has to to with the recorder
> booting wasn't Mackie. It was whoever made the motherboard, or
> whatever part of the motherboard makes it boot. It's a PC motherboard.
> I don't know of any PC motherboard from 1998 that will boot any size
> drive. Or any PC operating system, for that matter.
>

Well, Mackie *could* have made their own BIOS (or
modified the provided one). SFAIK, it would have
been perfectly legal. In the case of Fostex, it's
all firmware, so there was no reason at all to
constrain drive choices.

And just to be clear - there wasn't much reason for
the original PC BIOS to have those constraints, either.
After all, you could load drivers for supersized drives.

>> You can boot XP with either LILO or GRUB, and I was
>> booting '95 and '98 with LILO back around when these recorders
>> started being available.
>
> Sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about here.
>
>> In cases like that, I'd be sorely tempted to patch that binary to
>> make the dongle check go away.
>
> Shall I send you a copy? I don't have any idea how to do that either.

Not right now. Sorry.

> I'm
> just a user. I buy what works when I need it, and I hope it will work as
> long as I need it to work. So far I've been lucky and I'm not going to live
> that many more years.
>
> Kids today don't have the attention span to want to keep something
> working until the wheels fall off, so that's who the designers are
> designing
> for.
>
>

Well, when people's HD recorder died on 'em on alt.music.4-track, they
were usually pretty bummed.

--
les Cargill

Les Cargill wrote:

> Well, Mackie *could* have made their own BIOS (or
> modified the provided one). SFAIK, it would have
> been perfectly legal. In the case of Fostex, it's
> all firmware, so there was no reason at all to
> constrain drive choices.

I belive that the Fostex 8- and 16-track workstations
that were around when the Mackie recorders came out
were limited to some pretty small hard drives. Is anyone
out there using one today with, say, a 320 GB drive? I
seem to remember seeing occasional "where can I get
a?" postings from people looking for replacement drives
for these units.

The TASCAM MX-2424 used a 20 GB SCSI drive. Nobody
has those any more (either MX-2424s or 20 GB SCSI drives).
People just didn't future-proof computer based devices in
those days. I don't think they do now, either. Lots of hand-held
recorders that were designed before the SD-HC memory
card was developed won't recognize that card even though
it fits the same socket. And 360K 5-1/4" floppy drives wouldn't
work with 1.2MB disks either.

As a matter of fact, the SDR24/96 didn't use a PC
motherboard. It was all custom, and they believed (though
couldn't test it at the time) that it could accept drives up to
2 TB. This one was completely designed by Sydec under
a contract with Mackie, based on their Soundscape technology.
Mackie eventually bought Sydec, then gave it back during
their very lean years (it's now under Prism).

The SDR was created as a knee-jerk reaction to Alesis' HD24,
to match the price and I/O capability but keep the Mackie style.
I think it was discontinued after about 2 years, never quite
finished. A few of us know enough about the HDR and MDR to
keep them going. Nobody knows anything about the SDR.

Admittedly, Mackie didn't have a really disciplined engineering
process so it's not surprising that the designs had some holes
in them, but by using off-the-shelf components and purchasing
an operating system kernel, they were able to bring a product
to market quickly, and just in time for a fairly short run before
computers pretty much took over the market for digital multitrack
recording.

> And just to be clear - there wasn't much reason for
> the original PC BIOS to have those constraints, either.
> After all, you could load drivers for supersized drives.

This was one of the problems with the Mackie recorders. You
couldn't load drivers. Everything was compiled into a single
appllication. The HDR, which has a graphic interface, only
works with a limited range of graphics cards (which are becoming
hard to find) and as far as I know nobody has successfully
replaced the motherboard with something more modern, partially
because of port configurations, and partially because of the lack
of drivers for motherboard compoinents in the Mackie application.

Sure, go ahead. Say it's a bad design. But it isn't going to change now.
Mackie seems to not be willing or able to release source code so
someone can make a new version of the software for new computer
components. Its time came and went, and some are still alive.



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be operated without
a passing knowledge of computing, although it seems that it can be
operated without a passing knowledge of audio." - John Watkinson

In article <hmus19$hnr$(E-Mail Removed)>,
>Les Cargill wrote:
>
>> Optical interfaces that do 100BaseTX are commonplace. It's a COTS
>> TOSLINK optical part, or at least the guy's blog said it was.
>
>The guy with the blog, huh? Well, you can belive him, or you can take a
>look at the real data sheet:
>http://www.wavefrontsemi.com/index.p...productdocsoft

He's right, though. The physical interface is the same TOSLINK transceiver
that is used for S-PDIF over fibre.

The Wavefront chip is just used to interface the digital datastream with
a computer processor.

The good news is that the actual protocol is pretty well documented in the
Wavefront manuals, so someone dedicated could probably program an FPGA to
do the synch and lock stuff. It wouldn't be an easy job; I think it would
be worth a master's thesis, probably what gus baird called a "level 5 problem."

>Sure, it uses standard Toshiba optical-to-digital parts for the gozintas and
>gozoutas, but the thing that makes it ADAT Optical (tm) is the Wavefront
>chip. I suppose you could design your own, but for eight bucks (or three
>if you buy enough of them) why bother?

That's the basic point, yes. Eight dollars is still very cheap, cheaper than
what it takes to do MADI. Much as I am a fan of MADI, I have to admit that
lightpipe is cheap, universal, and hard to screw up for short runs.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Arny Krueger wrote:

>> The computer can talk WiFi, but how do you get the console to talk WiFi?
>> Is there a Firewire-WiFi interface?
>
> That usually means that the console has a USB port that allows it to be
> controlled from a computer, and that a remote console program can be used to
> control the computer from a remote computer over a network running over
> WiFi.

So it's really a (remote) computer networked (over WiFi) to a computer
that's
connected via USB to the console. It's not that the console is configured to
network via WiFi, but rather, the optional computer to which it's
connected.

Another "but first you gotta" thing, in this case add a computer, and in
this case
a not yet released piece of software to make the console remote
controllable.

--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be operated without
a passing knowledge of computing, although it seems that it can be
operated without a passing knowledge of audio." - John Watkinson

Mike Rivers <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>That's just one problem. Actually it's easy to find one - RME. It's
>expensive,
>though. And because RME is inclined to build everything themselves, it
>might not use the Wavefront chips, though it probably uses the Toshiba
>optical assemblies.

It doesn't use the Wavefronts, no. RME uses their own FPGAs.

>The problem is that cheap ADAT to USB interfaces are hard to find. And
>that doesn't have anything to do with the availability of parts, it has
>everything
>to do with the potential market. Apparently no manufacturer thinks it's big
>enough to put their time into developing a product.

You think ADAT to USB is expensive, look for MADI or TDIF to USB....
Small production products are expensive. It's just that way, and people
have become spoiled by the outrageously low costs of mass production.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Scott Dorsey wrote:

> You think ADAT to USB is expensive, look for MADI or TDIF to USB....
> Small production products are expensive.

I don't know that there's much of anything new coming out with TDIF. That
may have run its course, but I'm surprised that MADI hasn't picked up any
real steam. Or AES 50 (if I got the number right) - lotsa channels over a
single coax. Everybody seems to have trouble with Firewire so I'd think
that a couple of companies that make multi-channel Firewire interfaces
by the ten thousands would tool up to make both ends of a MADI interface.

> It's just that way, and people
> have become spoiled by the outrageously low costs of mass production.

Yup, and so has music.

--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be operated without
a passing knowledge of computing, although it seems that it can be
operated without a passing knowledge of audio." - John Watkinson

On Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:47:32 -0500, Mike Rivers <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

>analog outputs, so I expect that many are using it just as 8 mic preamps
>and don't
>care about the ADAT I/O (and are bitching that they could have made it
>cheaper

The ada8000 mic pres only drive the ADC and have no connection to
the analog outputs. The pres. can't really be used standalone that I
know of. There's been times when I really wanted to have a direct out
of the pre so if there is a way let me know.

David Light wrote:

> The ada8000 mic pres only drive the ADC and have no connection to
> the analog outputs. The pres. can't really be used standalone that I
> know of. There's been times when I really wanted to have a direct out
> of the pre so if there is a way let me know.

What happens if you connect the ADAT Out to the ADAT In? Will that get
the mic input to the analog output? Of course it's going through an A/D and
D/A conversion (something that most people would rather sell their
sister into
slavery than do) and unless you have an ADAT splitter, you can't get both
analog and digital output, but if you need to get mics up to line level
maybe
it'll work.

I just assumed that it had a "monitor" function like just about every other
similar (though more expensive) device has. But if the intent (as the web
site suggests) is that it be used as an expander for the digital console,
then that's where you get your monitoring.



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be operated without
a passing knowledge of computing, although it seems that it can be
operated without a passing knowledge of audio." - John Watkinson