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Gibson Guitars and Ethernet

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the pick-up-my-guitar-and-play dept.

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.

11 of 432 comments (clear)

  1. Very useful... by BMonger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I run a 16 and 32 channel mixing board myself and just figuring out which channel goes to which instrument/mic is a pain sometimes. According to the article when the item is plugged in it would show up on the mixing board as "Whomever's Guitar" or whatever it was set to. This would be very very handy I think for the people behind the scenes. Not only will it be beneficial to the quality of the sound but beneficial to people like me. Hopefully this technology will be implemented in more things that guitars, which I'm certain it will.

    It'd make life easier if you could upload effects straight to the guitar/mic instead of having to run it through an effects box too.

  2. Skip wires, move directly to wireless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    When my band plays, the floor is an absolute mess. There are cable running everywhere. Personally, I'd like to see Gibson move to wireless ethernet like 802.11 instead of wired ethernet. I hope Roland picks up on this. I have a session v-drum set and the only hassle is all those damn wires.

  3. Re:Snakeoil by proj_2501 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually that Roland guitar synth is really quite cool, and it still connects to your guitar amp.

  4. Technically superior? by Frank+Sullivan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It seems to me (as a guitarist, computer programmer, and amp builder) that part of the purpose, if not the MAIN purpose, of the guitar amp is to color the sound of the guitar in pleasing ways. So if tubes produce better colorations than "technically-superior digital solid state amps", then the tubes are technically superior, n'est pas?

    The only thing "technically superior" about digital amps is that they are cheaper to manufacture.

    And no, i won't be putting ethernet on my Gibson. Experience and simple physics dictates that the cord itself from the high-impedance guitar electronics to the amplifier input also colors the tone, and i'm not going to give up that coloration. Digitizing at 16bit/44.1khz "CD quality" commits absolute horrors on the subtleties of good tone (this can be mostly defeated with sufficient bandwidth, ie 24bit/96khz, but the Philips/Sony "Perfect Sound Forever" format is a crime against music).

    Then again, my main guitar is an acoustic with no electronics at all, so i suppose it won't be needing ethernet. :}

    --
    Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
    1. Re:Technically superior? by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It seems to me (as a guitarist, computer programmer, and amp builder) that part of the purpose, if not the MAIN purpose, of the guitar amp is to color the sound of the guitar in pleasing ways. So if tubes produce better colorations than "technically-superior digital solid state amps", then the tubes are technically superior, n'est pas?

      The bias for tube instead of transistor amplifiers stemmed from the crossover distortion of early Class-B transistor amplifiers. Tube amps also had Class-B output stages, but the crossover cutoff in tubes is smoother and more linear, handing the current from one of the output tubes to the other more cleanly. There was also a different sort of distortion in the Class-A preamp stages, resulting from the nonlinearity of the response of transistors to input voltages.

      Later generations of amps have improved the situation, and no doubt substuted (or exposed) other, more subtle, distinctions in how they distort (and thus "color") a signal.

      But that doesn't necessarily mean the effect you want is out of reach, or even expensive, with this system.

      If you cleanly digitize an audio signal, with a sampling rate high enough to keep "images" out of your ear and a word size big enough to keep quantization error below the noise of the analog components (or at least below the threshold of hearing when the instrument is silent) and with extra room for roundoff error in later computations, you have a faithful digital representation of the original signal.

      You can then DIGITALLY apply any "coloration" distortions that would have been applied by a tube amp, transistor amp, mismatched cabling/load impedence, blown-out speaker cone, or whatever floats your band's boat. Also echoes off the back of the speaker cabinet, the walls of a virtual "concert hall", the T-shirts of the front row of groupies, etc. Also a whole floor covered with virtual wah/fuzz/you-name-it boxes.

      About all that's missing is the ability of the sound from the speakers to drive the strings of your axe, to pull Hendrix-style feedback guitar effects. (And I have a few ideas on how that could be faked up, too.)

      So if your "effects mixer" throws a little CPU power at the problem you can get the same effect you would have gotten from a tube amp. (First-order distortions can be handled by a table lookup or a very simple function.)

      Throw some more CPU power at it and you can do everything that's ever been done in a concert or studio, plus a lot of new stuff that was just too complicated to do when it was build-a-box, but is trivial when it's write-a-few-lines-of-code.

      Of COURSE you won't put Ethernet in your (existing) Gibson - though I bet you'll plug it into an analog-guitar-to-Magic adapter box, if only to check that they got it working right. But I won't be surprised if the bulk of the next generation of instruments has Magic, or something like it, onboard, and makes music at least as wonderful as (if perhaps slightly different from) what we have now.

      This is an enabling technology. Once music is running down the cable as open-standard UDP packets, a whole generation of music hackers can start hammering it into any shape they want.

      --
      Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  5. Re:Snakeoil by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Guitar--> amp --> sounds great. No argument there. But no one here seems to understand that the amp itself could/will also have this jack there also, so the FOH mixer can get a signal post-amp and post-speaker-emulation. There's already XLR outs directly from amps that go straight into the snake to the board.

  6. Non-Digital, you say, offers better sound?! by MindPhlux · · Score: 1, Interesting

    you know, I see the millions of people getting all huffy.. "analog is better... amps never succeeded digital... I like the fuzziness of my guitar"...

    heh... if you would re-read the article, you would see that this is merely a digital *audio connection*. You can still keep your analog amps and such. I'm sure they'll tack on a digital out to an analog amp. And besides, the world does exist outside of guitars. just because gibson came up with the idea dosen't mean it's only for guitars. I'd love to have a digital out on my synth... it'd cut down on tons of midi hassle, and improve the sound quality too!

    carrreful... careful careful careful!

  7. Re:Snakeoil by rho · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Fair comments. But, before you disparage it, take into account the next bunch of teenagers saving their lawnmowing money for this "digital crap" may be the ones who will push music creation and/or delivery towards a brand new direction.

    Your complaints are similar to the first guy who complained about electrifying the guitar: "Just put a mic on a plain old' accoustic--that's the best sound you can get!"

    Here's a from-the-ass example: a bunch of guitar players get together in a club, connect all together through a switch, and run the signals through a processor that converts all the sounds to the same key. Which key is controlled by another device that reads motion patterns of the people on the dance floor. The combined sound is then piped into the club's speakers. Evolutionary music!

    Just keep an open mind about it. Sure, Gibson developed it to sell more stuff, but that's what they're there for. Unless you think that music stopped in the 1970's with guitar rock...

    --
    Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
  8. Re:mLAN by pcidevel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As I said, I'm no expert.. but I've played around with devices that create 50-100 (which is about the range I was thinking of with my statement) milliseconds worth of delay.. and playing has a very increased range of difficulty.. with more 100 milliseconds of delay, timing yourself with the rest of a live performance can become difficult..

    If you consider that speed of sound is roughly 1 feet per millisecond placing your speakers in the wrong position matters probably more than the latency of any reasonable system.

    I'd say I average about 10-20 feet maxiumum from my monitor's when I'm playing live.. and when I'm doing studio work I'm virtually inches from the speaker (pretty much all studio work is done with headphones).. I may be a bit off in my numbers (it may take a bit more latency than 50-100 milliseconds) but I doubt it would take much more than that to really throw you off...

    Consider as an example, watching a movie with 100 milliseconds of delay between the screen and the sound.. I'm willing to bet it would be a bit disorienting.. now imagine playing a musical instrument with latency like that..

    It's important to realize that the very first thing I did when I read this article is send a link to the bass player in my band, because I'm sure both he and I will be VERY interested in this technology.. I personally can't wait.. I wasn't trying to imply I doubt the technology at all.. Gibson does quality work with anything they do (did I mention I play a Les Paul? :)).. My statement had nothing to do with the article, but I was trying to point out why latency becomes a much bigger issue for technology like this than it would in a normal situation (like say transfering a file)..

    One last thing that hasn't been mentioned is processing latency.. an IP packet can be transmitted in 10ms, but you aren't giving any time to process the packet or the data on the recieving end.. which is going to be a big part of the latency..

    Again I'll point out, I'm no expert.. I'm just making guesstimates from my real life experiences with playing music..

    --

    I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!

  9. the case for ethernet speakers by option8 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    i asked once a while ago - and nobody was able to answer - whether it was possible or feasible to route audio signals over an ethernet network. my goal was to be able to have ethernet speakers with a sound source plugged into the network as well.

    my idea was spurred by the fact that my new office has ethernet in every room, but to get sound from the MP3 music server into those rooms, it would either require streaming the signal over the LAN (and each box would have its own buffer lag.. ugh) or else run speaker wire through all the rooms as well. why not use some portion of the ethernet standard to pump an audio signal through?

    so, it looks like somebody did me one better, and made an ethernet-enabled guitar and amp.

    so, when do i get to buy a receiver with 10/100 and a bunch of speakers with RJ45 jacks on them?

    --
    - Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
  10. Re:Some more applications for this. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Howzabout band practice over the web? No more need for rehearsal spaces as long as everyone has a fast connection in their bedroom/home studio...