Gibson to Embed Guitars with Ethernet

caseyuw writes "Gibson is planning to roll out their Magic this year with the delivery of guitars using Cat 5 instead of analog cables to connect instruments and amplifiers. The debate over the quality of digital vs analog signal processing is not new, but using a 'Magic' Les Paul would force you entirely into the digital domain." We mentioned this last year, but the above article has much more information.

Comments

Re:Wireless?

[chrome]

The latency is too high. I usually get around 11ms to my wireless 11mbit network at home. Had the same on my apple airport (actually, a bit slower, 15ms).

Might be that 54mbit wireless has good latency though.

One thing that annows me about the main post is the statement that Magic will 'force' people into digital. This is nonsense of course.

From the article: Those initial Magic guitars will also have traditional analog pickups. "It will essentially be two guitars in one: You don't have to go digital if you don't want to," said Arora.

Re:Wireless?

[dkessner]

1ms delay in a 100 ft cable? Not likely. Signals travel in a cable at about 1/2 the speed of light or about 6 inches per nanosecond. So a 100 ft cable will have a propagation delay of about 200 nanoseconds. That's a far cry from 1 ms (a.k.a. 1,000,000 nanoseconds).

On the other hand, sound travels through air at about 1 foot per millisecond (roughly). So that 100 ft cable would put Jimi 100 ms away from the monitor speakers. At 4/4 time and 120 beats per minute that is almost a quarternote of latency. Clearly no riff-master would ever want to be off by that much.

Likewise, you can think of latency as "adding distance between you and the speaker". For example, 1 ms of added latency is like adding another foot between you and the speaker. For most applications 5 ms isn't going to be noticeable, but the signal chain for a concert or studio can be long. And all those 5 ms delays really add up.

Gibson Magic is really just a CobraNet wannabe (www.peakaudio.com). CobraNet has been around longer, is more of an established standard, and has more sophisticated network management and routing than Magic. In contrast to CobraNet, Magic is a latecommer that was developed by people who should stick with guitars rather than 100Base-T. More to the point, CobraNet is supported by more than 30 different companies while Magic has maybe one supporter if you don't count Gibson itself.

And isn't this just a repeat post? It seems that Gibson Magic pops up here every so often but that they don't have any real new news...