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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.
Hey, I haven't had a first post in ages!
The TechTV article doesn't get too technical, so my natural first question is:
How does it encode the audio signal?
My second natural question is: Since the reverb pedal would alter the signal, would it violate the DMCA?
I'm a 2000 man.
I'm not sure how the impression got out there that this is about guitars. It's a connectivity solution - digital wireless cables, basically. Plug WHATEVER into a port, plug the central doohickey into the mixing bord, viola, they're connected. The innovation is not putting an ethernet port into a guitar (which as the article states is not even being done yet), but adding software to the ethernet protocol with the aim to minimize latency and synche everything to a master clock so that it can be used for music - making sure it all matches up and that the signal hits the mixer soon enough after the player hits the string/key/drum so that there is not a perceivable delay.
Oh, wait, I actually do know how the impression got out there. Silly me, as always it involves Slashdot editors that barely read the articles they post and Slashdot readers who feel justified in commenting on them without reading them at all.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
The REAL Bruce Perens has a helpful signature that tells us what the REAL Bruce Perens's slashdot ID number REALLY is.
Obviously this is a fake.
"And like that
Gibson's name is mud or less than mud in electronic music. They have a long history of buying small, innovative electronic music companies and running them into the ground and then shutting them down, like they did with Opcode recently. Opcode made OMS, which had become the standard MIDI routing app for Mac OS, but Gibson refused to open source it or even sell it to Apple when they asked. Instead, Apple had to hire the lead coder behind OMS and he built Mac OS X's MIDI subsystem from scratch, delaying that part of the OS until Mac OS X 10.1. It will be a long, long, long, long time before Gibson introduces an interconnection standard that people will build their instruments or studios around. Opcode also made Vision, one of the leading sequencers, used by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails just to name one, and those users are all writing songs in an entirely new environment now. Vision is in a box at Gibson and that's that. No open source, no selling to a new development team, nothing. Music is very tactile and muscle-memory based ... it's hard for a musician to switch songwriting or production environments. Those cats feel pretty burned by Gibson't strange behavior.
... a me-too from a company that is well behind the curve in the industry.
Also, guitar players are the least-digital and least-wired kind of musician. A guitar player typically knows more about vacuum tubes and resistors than he does about digital audio. Even if guitarists loved this technology, they are going to need help to identify what an Ethernet cable looks like.
AND, any digital guitar connection system would have to be WIRELESS to get people to move to it. Wireless adapters are small enough now that you don't even need a belt-pack anymore, some of them are just plugs that go into the guitar's output jack. You're not going to get a guitarist to give up his wireless for a fragile ethernet cable. This is a cute trick, is all