|
 | | | | Jul31Written by:Garry Simmons
Friday, July 31, 1998 6:00 PM  There is quite a buzz about the Yamaha DSP Factory these days.
The DSP Factory is a PC-based recording system built around the DS2416 soundcard and optional input/output (I/O) components. And with the imminent release of the DSP Factory, the buzz is growing even louder. A listing of the basic features of the card has been available on Yamaha's web site for a while, but detailed information on the capabilities of the card has been scarce.
Personally, I'm excited about the card too, so I went to Nashville on a quest to find out some details. I was lucky enough to have Yamaha's Mark Lopez give me a demo of the card at the NAMM show. Mark was then nice enough to spend the better part of an hour with me (on the phone), filling in details I didn't ask about at the show.
Disclaimer time… Since the card isn't shipping yet, features and specs are still subject to change… Also note that I have not had the opportunity to use a DSP Factory in my own studio to verify all this works as explained to me… Although I tried to be 100% accurate, I may have accidentally misunderstood something Mark told me over the phone… Your mileage may vary… No salesman will call… Not intended for use on house pets or small children… On with the factory tour!
Let's start off by looking at the products that make up the DSP Factory. The centerpiece is, the DS2416 soundcard, touted as a Yamaha 02R mixer on a card. The DS2416 is a PCI card, featuring 5 DSPs, that has a pair of stereo unbalanced, analog inputs and outputs (on RCA jacks) with 20-bit converters plus a (24-bit capable) S/PDIF input and output (also on RCA jacks).
The DSP Factory family also includes additional I/O modules that let you customize the system to the I/O needs of your particular studio. The AX44 is the first optional I/O module to be available. It provides 4 analog inputs, 4 analog outputs, and a headphone jack. Up to two optional I/O modules can be connected to the DS2416 using a pair of special connectors on the card. Other cards, such as another DS2416 or SW1000XG can be connected to the DS2416 using a (separate) pair of special connectors on the card.
If you break the DSP Factory system down into its major functional components, you'll find a 24x8x2 mixer, two digital effects units, Windows drivers that provide playback and recording hooks for use by other audio applications, a digital patchbay, and the actual hardware I/O. Let's examine these major components in more detail…
Let's consider the mixer first. The DS2416 is a software-controlled digital mixer. But since Yamaha doesn't provide any software to control the mixer, it's the equivalent of an analog console without knobs. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Yamaha has given software developers the tools they need to control the power of the DSP Factory. Each software developer chooses the capabilities of the card they want to support, and how they want to present that power to the user. The list of software companies that are supporting the DSP Factory includes almost all the big names in multi-track digital audio. The Yamaha web site has preliminary screen shots from several of these companies. The screen shots provide a glimpse of how each company plans on integrating DSP Factory support into their programs. It can't be stressed enough that it is up to the third-party programmers to decide which features to support, and how to integrate them into their programs. Some programs are being written from scratch to support the DSP Factory (IQS SAWStudio). Other programs only provide a way to control the DSP Factory, but don't offer any hard-disk recording or playback support (C-Console). In this case you would run your favorite DAW app and the C-Console app at the same time and switch between windows as needed. Most of the other developers are integrating support into existing products.
Since we're talking software interfaces, let's consider the drivers. Initially, drivers will be available for Windows 9x only. Mac OS drivers are under development and NT drivers under consideration (no promises). The Windows drivers provide the "glue" to connect your favorite audio program to the mixer. The 16 hard-disk playback channels (i.e. outputs from your DAW program) show up as 8 stereo WAV drivers. The 8 channels of hard-disk recording show up as 4 stereo pairs for input to your favorite DAW program. By using standard Windows drivers to interface existing apps to the DSP Factory, Yamaha has opened the door for enterprising programmers to create really slick user interfaces for controlling the card, without requiring those developers to build an entire audio application. I expect (and hope) to see some very cool control programs for this card in the future.
The mixer has 24 input channels. Each channel can be driven from one of several different input sources. The available input sources are; hard-disk playback, standard I/O (the analog and digital I/O on the DS2416), optional IO (the optional I/O expander cards such as the AX44), cascaded I/O (for connecting another DSP Factory or SW1000XG), and internal FX (the pair of stereo effects returns from the onboard effects). All sources are not available on all channels. The following table lists the sources that are available for each channel:
Channels 1 – 8 HD Playback, Optional I/O
Channels 9 – 16 HD Playback, Optional I/O, Cascaded I/O
Channels 17-20 Standard I/O, Optional I/O, Cascaded I/O
Channels 21-24 Internal FX Returns, External I/O, Cascaded I/O
It is important to note that audio on the standard, optional and cascaded input sources can be mixed in real-time with the hard-disk playback tracks. For example, you could configure the mixer for 16 tracks of hard-disk playback (channels 1-16), a stereo submix of your MIDI gear feeding the analog input (channels 17 and 18), digital effects return on the SPDIF input (channels 19 and 20), and use channels 21-24 for effects returns from the internal effects processors. You would monitor the main L/R mix from the analog outputs and feed your outboard effects using the SPDIF output. That's a lot of power without buying any additional I/O cards. The key is that the DSP Factory was designed to integrate with external gear you already own.
On to the channel strips… Each channel has 6 auxiliary sends. The sends can be routed to any standard or optional output. Two of the sends can be routed to the inputs of the onboard effect processors instead of sending them to external gear. You may have a hard time utilizing all the aux sends if you don't purchase any additional I/O capability. The addition of an AX44 opens up a world of possibilities for integrating external gear with the DSP Factory. For example, I'm rather fond of my Ensoniq DP/4. The DP/4 can be configured to provide four independent effects, fed from four mono inputs. The DP/4 will output one (or two) stereo effect returns. If I was to add an AX44 to the DS2416 card, I could use aux sends 1 through 4 to feed each of the inputs on my DP/4. I would then connect the two stereo DP/4 outputs to the AX44 inputs. By setting up channels 17 through 20 to use the AX44 inputs as sources, I could have 16 channels of playback, plus 6 effects (4 external, 2 internal) returning on 8 effects returns (channels 17 through 24). This is only one possible way to use the aux sends. Custom headphone mixes are another use for the extra I/O provided by the AX44. Again, the point to remember is that the DSP Factory is a real mixer, with the routing flexibility that a mixer provides.
Each channel also has 4 bands of fully parametric EQ plus high and low shelving EQ/filters. Each band of parametric EQ can be swept between 20Hz and 20KHz, plus has adjustable Q (the width of the bell shaped hump or notch). This is a serious amount of real-time EQ. The main Left/Right outputs also feature the same EQ as the channels.
As if the EQ wasn't enough, each channel of the mixer also has its own dynamics module. The dynamics module can be (either) a gate, an expander, a compressor, a limiter, or a ducker. These are mutually exclusive choices, so you can't combine controllers to create an expander/compressor or compressor/limiter for example.
The mixer features channel delay on channels 1 through 20. What is channel delay and why do you need it? The standard and optional analog inputs to the mixer need to be converted to digital before being processed by the mixer. Simply put, it takes a little time (N samples), to do an analog to digital conversion. This means that the digital audio coming off your hard disk would be a little bit ahead of the live analog inputs. By delaying the digital tracks N samples, the hard-disk tracks will be in sync with the (just converted) analog inputs. Another use for channel delay is to time-align a distant mic and a close mic on the same source (such as aligning drum overheads with the close mics on the kit). By delaying the close mic track a tiny bit, you can time-align the close mic and the distant mic. If you never try to mix live analog inputs with hard-disk playback tracks, then you may never need to use channel delay, but it's nice to know it's there.
Finally, you can assign each channel to the eight buses or the main stereo output. The cool thing about the buses is that you can record the buses by patching them to the four stereo WAV drivers your favorite DAW program uses for input. Let's say you want a huge vocal sound, ala Queen. You could overdub a dozen tracks of backing vocals (while listening to a submix of basic tracks), then route those vocal tracks to a pair of buses that are patched to a WAV driver (for recording). Record the submix and free up most of those original dozen mixer channels for other tracks. You could also create a submix of live inputs, and patch that submix to a WAV driver.
Details of the digital patchbay were not finalized at this writing, so the best I can provide is a general description of the intent. The physical I/O on the card (and optional I/O) plus the Windows drivers, provide inputs and outputs to the DSP Factory system. There are lots of virtual inputs and outputs on the mixer itself (aux sends, buses, the stereo out, etc.). The patchbay idea lets you patch the mixer ins and outs to the hardware and driver ins and outs. It sounds incredibly flexible. One thing I haven't seen mentioned is channel inserts. It would be so cool to be able to insert something like a favorite tube compressor on a vocal track being played from hard disk. This complicates the channel delay issue since an analog insert point would require two conversions…
Last, but not least, are the two on-board digital effects units. This preview has gone on long enough, so I won't bother typing in the list of effects algorithms. Yamaha claims the effects are equal in quality to the REV500. Effect types fall broadly into reverbs, modulation effects, distortion, and dynamic filters, plus combinations of these effects.
The DS2416 also includes 8 recording buses. The actual recording takes place in your DAW software by selecting the Windows drivers you want for input. Since the Yamaha provides 4 stereo pairs of recording buses, all you have to do is patch your desired source to the appropriate WAV driver, just like an analog 8 bus mixer that has an 8 track attached to the group outputs.
This is only the first wave of products for the DSP Factory. An ADAT I/O card has been announced that will provide 2 ADAT Lightpipe inputs and 2 ADAT Lightpipe outputs. Other components are sure to follow. Don't forget that you can run two DS2416s at the same time by cascading them together using special cascade I/O connectors on the card. Or cascade a DS2416 and a Yamaha SW1000XG for adding some serious XG MIDI horsepower to the DSP Factory.
So what's the bottom line on the DSP Factory? There's a stunning amount of power on the card for an incredible list price of only $999. But, and this is a huge but, it is up to the third-party companies writing software to interface with the card to exploit the power under the hood and to do it in a clean, intuitive manner. The purpose of this article was to let the world know what the card is capable of doing. There are no guarantees that every program will support all the power the card has to offer. Check out the screen shots from your favorite DAW program on the Yamaha web site (and also the ProRec archives) to get feel for the different approaches to supporting the card. It's supposed to ship by September 1st, so keep your eyes peeled for a review in ProRec!
Tags: | | | | | | | |
|
|