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Gibson Guitars and Ethernet
Gordon_Cabaniss writes "Gibson, the country's second largest guitar manufacturer, teamed up with twelve Silicon Valley engineers and modified the ethernet protocol to link audio between instruments and the mixer. Gibson is calling the technology MAGIC and they are boasting 'both a cleaner sound and a simpler setup.' 'Gibson's Magic carries up to 64 signals per cable, thus saving space and time.' The technology is licensed royalty free and tech giants Sony, Phillips, and Cisco are already showing interest. Gibson also says to not be surprised to see Ethernet ports on guitars within the next 12 to 18 months." I love the idea of my SG having 100mb/s ethernet on it. I'm sure all 3 of my chords would sound ... well, just as bad, but digital.
Guitarists have already rejected technically-superior digital solid state amps going back instead to vacuum tubes because of the warmer sound. They won't go digital this time either.
I have a lot of experience working with guitar players and many of them would never go with this type of thing. Most guitar players like their sound raw, using analog effects and tube amps. Why? Because its sounds so good. There's nothing like the crunch of plugging your guitar into a Marshall stack and blowing people out of the building. It's tough to capture that tube sound in digital technology, and this ethernet guitar takes it one step farther away from the analog that they want. I really can't see a lot of hard core musicians going for a system like this.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Wanna know the first problem I see with this: Nobody plugs their guitar straight into the mixer. The guitar amplifier is an integral part of the tone and playability of a guitar. A Les Paul plugged into a Marshall stack; A Stratocaster plugged into a Fender Twin; These are still around because they work. Stick a mic in front of the amp, run that through the sound system, and away you go. Save the digital conversions for places where it's needed.
Bands don't need more-complicated ways to hook their guitars up. The current way works just fine. There are some wonderful improvements occuring with digital consoles, digital system processors, and so on. But these have little to do with Gibson and guitars.
Gibson is still trying to find ways to put a New & Improved label on an already perfect guitar invented over 40 years ago, just to get people to buy the latest crap.
Sad part is, people will.
(Yes, I'm a sound man. And I do have digital consoles to work with. But all the digital crap in the world won't make a player any more talented.)
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
BTW, on top of this, sequencers/multitraks/etc could remember effect/send/insert, levels, eqs, etc for each instrument. So a musician could come into the studio, work for awhile, save his setup, and then have that setup automatically come up again the next time he plugged into the studio a few weeks later. The more devices were MAGIC aware, the more time would be saved in setting up between projects. I can just set it .. foot pedals remembering which instruments were set to what levels ... oooooooo, so cool.
"Old man yells at systemd"
As a guitar player of 15 years and the proud owner of a ton of bizzare equipment (and the proud ower of a B.A. in Music Composition) I can say this will bomb. There are very, very subtle electrical interactions that happen between an amp (or stomp boxes) and the pickups in the guitar. You think that there isn't a forward or backward voltage bias that effects the sounds? You think this stuff is so simple you can just digitize it and expect the magical ethernet to handle it?
No, kids. This is the wild and wooly world of magical analog electronics and while digital makes leaps and bounds, I honestly doubt it will quite match the lovely interaction between a classic Les Paul and a Marshall stack. The would be a GODSEND for MIDI, but as another poster noted, Yamaha already has a way of doing this over Firewire, which is a vastly superior technology for this kind of time-sensitive thing because of it's isochronous transport layer. Ethernet with it's packet collisions will just simply not do. (not to mention the joy of potentially having firewire powered synth modules without the pain in the ass wall warts)
And finally, latency is the death of electric/electronic instruments. Can they guarantee the (nearly) zero latency that I can already get with my analog gear?
Guitarists are VERY conservative when it comes to gear. I worked as a vacuum tube tech for a while working on guitar amps. Guitar amps are the only place in electronics where you look at an RCA manual from the 1930's to find out what the specs are for something.
The digital amp-modeling units have had some succesd---I have a POD that I play almost exclusively. But guitars will NOT change. The iconic image of a rock star holding a Gibson or a Fender is embedded in the minds of too many middle-aged guitar players.
They only way this could happen is if the plug looks exactly like the current 1/4" model (another product from the 30's). Oh, and it has to be compatible with existing analog gear.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
For a digital amplifier to truly replace tubes, the current state of DACs and ADCs just don't cut it. There needs to be a much higher resolution in these devices, perhaps 128 bit or even higher. Then, these devices need to learn to react to the dynamics of the player well - a good tube amp can go from a soft passage to full-tilt scream by playing harder and hitting the volume control. Finally digital amps need to be able to do feedback - i.e. interact with guitar pickups in such a way that will interactively produce feedback at different harmonics of the original signal depending on the angle and proximity of the guitar to the amplifier.
Until that happens, I'm sticking with tubes. Perhaps a better application of digital tech to the world of guitar would be to simply make tubes work better - more reliably and consistently.
That said, I'm all for ethernet replacing MIDI. But that's an entirely different proposition.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?