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Music Media

Gibson Guitars and Ethernet 432

Posted by CmdrTaco 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.
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Gibson Guitars and Ethernet More

Gibson Guitars and Ethernet

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  • whee (Score:5, Funny)

    by VAXGeek ( 3443 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:35PM (#2654741) Homepage
    you may have Ethernet on your Gibson, but I have NetBSD on my Fender.
  • This is a dangerous guitar. I played one once and almost shelled out the $1500 for it, because it played so damn sweet.

    *whew* That was close! :)

    Now, if it had an ethernet port on it? I probably wouldn't have been able to resist. Music and geekery combined into one? An absolutely irresistable combination, IMO.
  • It takes a real genius to both start a huge multinational guitar company AND at the same time start the cyberpunk genre. Who knew?

  • Aw yeah! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:36PM (#2654752)
    Now someone can root my six-string and play some good music, since I have no talent for playing.

    hee

  • How was the concert? (Score:3, Funny)

    by soft_guy ( 534437 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:36PM (#2654753)
    Q: How was the concert? A: Fine until some jerk started a denial of service attack on the band over 802.11.

    • Soz - cant help myself..... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Marcus Brody ( 320463 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:25PM (#2655113) Homepage
      -Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! Rock on, baby....

      -Does anyone know where I can download Gibson-Linux?

      -"Yeah dude, we were like ROCKING wembley stadium... But then we got slashdotted"

      -Cant play tonight.... guitar got a virus.

      -This Guitar has caused an illegal operation and will be restarted.

      -"Hi, looks like your trying to play Johnny B. Goode. Would you like me to help you with that?"

      -This guitar sucks. It only has two notes: 1 and 0

      -Hey, I cant get broadband. Do you think they will release a modem version?

      -Token ring on the guitar string?

      -Packet loss during the thrash-metal guitar solo?



      Was the big bang louder than drum & bass?

  • mLAN (Score:5, Informative)

    by wouter ( 103085 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:39PM (#2654779) Homepage
    Yamaha developed a similar technology that could transport audio and midi-signals, going over firewire.

    http://www.yamaha.com/proaudio/products/system_m la n.htm

    It's an interesting way to hook up sequencers, samplers, synthesizers and sound cards to each other without having to plug in audio and midi wires, and worry about magnetic interference.

    mLan can do about 100 separate channels of music (good enough for a Dolby 5.1 system? :) and 16x256 channels of MIDI data. Throughput is up to 200Mbps, so you don't have to worry about MIDI latency again :)

    • Re:mLAN (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nater ( 15229 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:52PM (#2654892) Homepage

      Throughput is up to 200Mbps, so you don't have to worry about MIDI latency again :)

      Throughput and latency are different things. Here's an example to illustrate:

      • In New York, fill a railroad box car with 80GB hard drives filled with your mountain of data (many many many many terabytes in that box car).
      • Send the boxcar to San Francisco in the way that one would expect to send a box car from New York to San Franciso.
      • Unload the hard drives from the boxcar

      Now, some calculations using simple numbers. Let's say you managed to stuff 5 exabytes of data into the box car and it took 3 days to get to San Francisco. Your throughput would be around 34 GB/s. Your latency would be around 3 days.

      Is the difference clear now?

      • Isn't latency included in a throughput calculation? Wouldn't the throughput in your example actually be measured as 5 exabytes per 3 days, since you wouldn't actually be receiving 34 GB/s in San Francisco, it would just be all at once.

        • Well, one way to measure it is to calculate how long it takes to send X amount of data from end to end and then do the appropriate division (that's how I calculated it, cause it's simple and it makes the point). But that does include latency in the throughput calculation. So you could measure latency separately and just subtract it from the elapsed time and do the division over again. Some people might consider that more accurate, but whatever. Under most networking circumstances, the latency is low enough that most people just ignore it anyway. In the box car example it would make a big difference. Tremendously big. Let's arbitrarily say that it takes about 1 minute to actually "arrive" in San Francisco. That makes throughput about 170 Tb/s. Most impressive. Another way to measure throughput is to pick a random point along the network and measure (at full usage) how much data goes past that point in a second. That's usually more work than is really necessary to get a good enough answer, but in the box car example, if you estimate that New York and San Fran are about 3000 miles apart, you can calculate the train's average speed and if you assume a certain size box car, you can calculate how long it would take to pass an average point at the average speed. Then take that number and do the division.

          Anyway, it was just an illustrative example. Technical accuracy is only of secondary importance to the main purpose of showing the difference between throughput and latency.

          • But in this application latency is the most important aspect (bandwith is most likely not very important at all).. That is why people are making the distinction.. 170 Tb/s is great bandwith, but at a latency of 1 minute that bandwith wont do a bit of good in a time critical situation like music.. in other words, you can transfer a huge file extremely fast and latency won't affect you much at all.. but in the world of music, when you consider that my pick touching the string is transmitted at near light speed (via an analog patch cable) to the amp, there is almost no latency between each note being played and heard (probably speed of sound is the biggest latency factor).. obviously, this is a simplified example...

            In order for this technology to be successfull, a throughput of 200 Mb/s doesn't help if the latency is terrible.. the data is real time and needs to be transmitted real time to the recieving device.. even a few dozen milliseconds of latency can hurt the abilities of the person playing the music (and make the timing of the band extremely difficult, near impossible unless everyone in the band has the same latency)..

            Uhmm.. all of that should be considered my opinion.. I'm no expert.. hell.. I probably don't even know an expert.. or really know anyone that knows an expert.. so uhh.. that's just my take on things.. ;) I guess I'm saying YMMV...
            • even a few dozen milliseconds of latency can hurt the abilities of the person playing the music

              I really cannot imagine what kind of system would have a few dozen milliseconds of latency. It takes like 10ms to send IP packets over a couple of hundred miles via multiple routers. You really don't need that special hardware to send some sound 30 feet or so - digital or not.

              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.

              • Re:mLAN (Score:3, Interesting)

                by pcidevel ( 207951 )
                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..

        • Re:mLAN (Score:3, Informative)

          by dillon_rinker ( 17944 )
          Consider ethernet at 10 million bits per second. Those don't all arrive at the end of the second. They arrive in 1500 byte chunks, each of which takes 12 ms to transmit.Yet we do not describe ethernet as having a bandwidth of 1500 bytes/12 ms.

          I would conclude that the bandwidth in question is not 5 exabytes/3 days.

      • Re:mLAN (Score:2, Informative)

        by StikyPad ( 445176 )
        It's not quite as simple as your boxcar analogy.

        Here's another example:
        • In New York, write the first letter from the first sentence of Marcel Proust's "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu" on a scrap of paper and tie it around the neck of a pigeon.
        • Release the pigeon and wait for him to make the trip to San Francisco and back.
        • Repeat with the next letter.

        We'll pretend that our pigeon can fly supersonic and requires little or no sleep, so he can make the round trip in under 24 hours. So our actual latency one way would be 12 hours. However, we can't respond until we have transmitted the entire novel. So 9,609,000 days later, the work has been sent in its entirety. Your throughput would be around 1.157407e-5b/s. Your effective latency would be 26 millennia.

        --
  • A generation ago, you proved yourself talented by playing the guitar behind your back, or, in Hendrix's case, with your teeth.

    Now, you'll have to prove yourself talented by playing your guitar in such a way as to hax0r slashdot.
  • CCL maps Guitar chords to common Linix commands and a subset of the ASCII character set. By playing a sequence of guitar chords, you can set up commands, pipes, and filters. Output is delivered by speech synthesizer. While the speech synthesizer text is from Linix, the frequency and other parameters are computer-driven to harmonize with, or improvise upon, the chords of your input. Visual output similarly turns mundane text into a rock video.

    Bruce :-)

  • The Spec (Score:5, Informative)

    by d5w ( 513456 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:43PM (#2654810)
    The actual MaGIC spec [gibson.com] is available from Gibson's site.

  • Sorry, not Ethernet (Score:2, Insightful)

    by xyzzy ( 10685 )
    What the hell -- they "modified" ethernet? Sorry, then it's not ethernet. Can you broadcast other data over the same fabric and have it work? Then MAYBE I'll believe it's ethernet. Other than that, they ripped off some ideas. But why do people keep reinventing the wheel like that? I bet they could have used EXACTLY ethernet and it would have just worked.
    • They just added a perl onion...

      I wouldn't get to woked up. the source on this usually isn't to tech savy. probably didn't change the protocal at all. But if they did go beyond the specs, then you're probably right.
      2 point though:
      1)you can change something and not violate the specs.
      2)They found out the a certian military helicopter could pitch its blades 104%. (4% beyond the spec, which allows it to do cool things). does that mean it's not a helicopter?
      • Right, I did fail to normalize for press-release-itis and tech-journalism-itis. [but then again, so does 95% of the staff of slashdot, heh]

        However, to respond to your comments:

        - If you change the spec, and the thing no longer performs all the functions in the spec, you have done a bad thing. Hence my comment about running it over a regular networking fabric, with other traffic. So, the fact that the helicopter still flies means it's still a helicopter. But if you can't do all the other fun stuff that ethernet does, it ain't ethernet.

    • Re:Sorry, not Ethernet (Score:2, Informative)

      by Feynman ( 170746 )
      I think if you read the spec [gibson.com], you'll find that it conforms to some level of the IEEE 802.3 PHY and link layers. It's the application layer that's been customized.

      So, no, it's not "ethernet" in the sense that it complies fully across all layers and clauses of the 802.3 standard for some application. It's simply the same physical and link layers to permit use of standard connectors, media, and other physical-layer hardware.

    • yeah, so it's not ethernet. big deal. what's your issue? did you read the spec? there's good reasons they don't want any extra overhead, even the relatively minimal overhead imposed by ethernet. it's not like they're running IP over the link, or any other higher-level protocol. everything's designed for exactly one function, and highly optimized for it. real-time uncompressed live audio at analog quality is tough. you'd loose your bet.
      now, as other people have mentioned, they might have been able to get away with using straight FireWire and had it just work...
      • Right, and I acknowledge that, and it's all well-and-good. But don't call it "Ethernet". The reason they did that is annoying, they want to piggyback on the idea of computer networking. It's a marketing maneuver. But hey, we're all engineers here, and when we say a word, we have a particular meaning in mind.

        A few other notes:

        - Since they're running point-to-point, no broadcasts, with high-speed ethernet they should have no problem with bandwidth. I do realtime speech recognition with audio streamed in realtime over an ethernet, WITH TCP/IP, and we do just fine. And don't try and convince me that speech recognition is less quality and latency sensitive than a guitar!

        - Despite all the people telling me to "read the fscking article", the phrase "Gibson did this by modifying the Ethernet networking protocol..." makes me highly suspicious. But then again,it is really marketing fluff we're arguing about, so all bets are off. :-)
    • It's nothing new anyway.

      Line 6, a digital music gear company, has used RJ-45 connectors and cat5 cable for a while now on their modeling amps and processors. Usually they connect a controller to a master unit; my POD can have a pedalboard connected via a standard ethernet cable, as long as it's not a crossover.

      RJ45 is great for small apps like this. The jacks can be TINY and allow for all kinds of miniaturization. In the past you needed huge MIDI "cannon" jack or a >1 inch deep 1/4" jack.

      I think this thing will compete more with S/PDIF than anything else.

    • Re:Sorry, not Ethernet (Score:4, Informative)

      by anticypher ( 48312 ) <anticypherNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:39PM (#2655231) Homepage
      Did you read the spec? Looks like ethernet to me.

      At the physical layer, they have chosen to use inline power ethernet, an emerging standard. Data pins remain unchanged. Power over ethernet seems to be optional, its just there for unpowered devices like acoustic guitars.

      At the link layer, they conform to standard MAC addressing, and leave space for IP/TCP/UDP headers, so the signals can be routed/bridged.

      There are new packet definitions for timing and other functions, but I wouldn't be surprised if I could just plug a pair of cisco routers in between some of these devices and make them work across a town. It might take some careful bridging configuration, but it looks like straight forward networking at layer 2.

      The next higher layer jumps straight to application layer(7), and defines audio channels and control signals. As a networking person, I couldn't care less about that, I'll deliver any packet payload. And the application doesn't really care whether I moved the signals over fibre or copper or a WAN link.

      Given their careful stepping around of the IP/TCP header area, I'd say when these devices exist, they will bridge/repeat any other IP traffic that obviously isn't MAGIC traffic. So you can have a browser behind your mix panel with only a single connection to the local router, and your friends can be playing their instruments behind their DSL connections.

      For geek factor, I'd give this a 9. Very cool.

      I'll leave the "gouging the musicians" comments to the musicians :-)

      the AC
    • Why would anyone use this when they could use Yamaha's mLAN anyway? mLAN's based on FireWire, so it's much faster and has the advantage of having a built-in isochoronous (time-dependent) transport protocol.
      It's clearly the audio bus of the future (due in no small part to the fact that it can be connected to most off-the-shelf computers these days) -- it's even already supported in Mac OS X Core Audio.

  • Not gonna fly (Score:4, Insightful)

    by javaaddikt ( 385701 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:44PM (#2654815)
    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.

    • Technically superior? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Frank Sullivan ( 2391 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:04PM (#2654984) Homepage
      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. :}
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I'm very much with you on the idea of tubes making for a great sound and solid state not so much, but I'm not so mighty about my tube amp since I heard a few effects systems on computer systems that did a passing good job of coloring a digital signal like tubes. Now, it's not 100 percent, but it was better than anything solid state that I've heard. That said, it's looking like it would be worth having digital signal from the guitar, and then running your effects afterwards. It probably won't ever please a strict purist, but it adds a level of flexibility that wasn't there before, and the best part is that one can record a pure signal and then manipulate it many different ways to find just the right sound.

        Also, don't rule out Ethernet just because you're acoustic. I play mostly classical guitar, and I would love to be able to take the signal from the end-block mike and send it noise-free to the sound board. In this instance, coloring by the amplifier is a bad thing (at least for me).

        Virg
      • Here's something I haven't understood about digital sampling rates and "analog" sound. If your final format is CD, then won't you loose the same "coloration" of the sound if your guitar/keyboard/mixer is digital? In which case, as long as your equipment has a high quality A/D converter, it really shouldn't make a difference.

        Of course, this is all speculation. I have a VirusKB "Virtual Analog" digital keyboard, and I have a Juno 106 Analog keyboard. As good as the Virus sounds (great, actually), there's definatly a "phatter" sound coming from the Juno.
        • If your final format is CD, then won't you loose the same "coloration" of the sound if your guitar/keyboard/mixer is digital?

          The idea is that each component that modifies the digital signal slightly degrades the sound quality. If you turn the volume down on a digital mixer, then you're effectively throwing away the least significant bits of the audio stream. The goal, then, is to sample your sound at a high enough resolution that even after all of those lossy transformations, you end up with enough bits left over to fill the CD master's dynamic range.
      • Digitizing at 16bit/44.1khz "CD quality" commits absolute horrors on the subtleties of good tone

        Actually, according to the spec you can negotiate up to 192kHz at the expense of only four channels as opposed to 32 at 48kHz. No matter, I agree, as a programmer and owner of a Les Paul 59 Reissue plugging into a Marshall and cutting loose is what it's about and always will be. However, if you're experimenting with digital effects, or want custom setups for the road, I would imagine just having a linux box connected to a hub of intruments and a mixer connected to your PA might be a rather pleasant setup to work with. I would consider this progress. And the spec looks very genuine. I wonder how long it will be before there are linux drivers so you can just plug right into a hub on your LAN.
      • 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.
    • "Guitarists have already rejected technically-superior digital solid state amps going back instead to vacuum tubes because of the warmer sound."

      I'm not sure that this is true. The first wave of transistor amps that came out where largely avoided if you had the money to buy valves. Eventually though the transistor people stopped calling the guitarists ignorant, and realised that they need to listen to what the guitarists where saying.

      The solid state amps which are coming out now sound far far better, and are much closer to the sound of a valve than even five years ago. And of course they are much more robust than valve technology, and cheaper.

      Who knows?

      Phil
      • Solid state has its own character. The Roland JC-120 is a good example. Also, highly processed guitars can do some neat shit.

        One thing I've noticed about the current 'wave' of musicians is that they seem to respect progress. They don't say "tubes only, dude" or "all effects all the time". They know when to use effects and when not to.
    • That simply isn't accurate. First off, calling a digital amp "technically superior" is just stupid. Beyond the conveniences of versatility, portability, power consumption etc., the only measure of the "superiority" of an amp is that a particular guitarist likes the way they sound playing through it. Every amp has it's own sound, tube amp technology is very mature and stable, so naturally even today there are a lot more decent sounding tube amps than pure solid state - just as a lot of early digital transcriptions of music for CDs sound like garbage compared to the same album on LP.


      More to the point, there is plenty of solid state amplification going on in guitars, both 100% and partial (all modern tube amps have solid state components), see for just one example Line 6 [line6.com].


      Finally, this is jsut a totally different issue. It isn't about amplification. This is about getting signals -any signals, not just guitars -to the mixing board. That's it. In the end of course how well the software maintains and presents the signal will determine if it is adopted. They say it is "cleaner" - in my book this often means they've cut off the top and bottom of the signal, eliminating a lot of signal with the noise and making for a flatter, less rich sound. And this is what's wrong with the assumption that digital is necessarily better than analog. People say, a CD samples at a higher rate than the ear can perceive, therefore anyone who says the digital signal is lacking is an idiot. No: but how the format and processing of the signal and how it is presented by playback equipment can have a serious effect on how much and exactly what is included and excluded from the raw input. Do it very well and you have a faithful reproduction, but with most of the annoying artifact noise removed. Do it poorly and you have the first CD release of Pink Floyd's Meddle. My brother made me a cassette from a 5+ year-old second-hand LP and it sounded better. Noisier, but better. This is why many early digital amps failed. Their signal was flat, thin, dull, the early attempts to model tube effects were crude.

    • You're probably right, although in a way it's unfortunate. I finally found my prefered tone by using my solid state Bass amp (Peavey MarkIII with an Ampeg SVT cabinet (8x10)) and a tube distortion emulator (Tech21 XXXL) after trying and rejecting several other solutions, both tube and solid state. Not surprising, really, considering that the first Marshalls were just copies of the Fender Bassman.

      The transistor really got a bad rap from those first few years of solid state amps, but the fact is that the tube amps from the first year or two after Fender was bought by CBS were just as bad. In truth, that great sound came from a combination of the electrocal properties of tubes, poor engineering, and shoddy assembly (both in the amp and the tubes themselves). After CBS got Leo Fender out of the way their engineers went in and cleaned up everything they could, and the result was amps that sounded like crap!

      That said, there are certainly audible differences between standard transistors and tubes (even vs. odd-order harmonics, clipping speed, current vs. voltage triggered, etc.), but most of them can be overcome by using FETs. There is still an audible difference, but I find my solid state tone to be smoother, more consistent, just as warm, and about $300 a year cheaper!

    • Yep. I'll stick with my Telecaster and my Boogie, and all the analog cables and 70s stomp boxes in between.

      I once called Roland to find out exactly when my Phase II was manufactured, and they had no record of ever manufacturing anything called a "Phase II." It was too old to have been entered into their new-fangled computers.

      I've played with all the Line6 stuff; I've put it on tape side by side with the Boogie, and their best rectifier model just can't touch the real thing.

  • Very useful... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BMonger ( 68213 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:45PM (#2654822)
    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.

  • ugh. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    this in theory is okay i guess, but i have a
    feeling it'll "TAKE OFF" like all the midi
    synthesizers that've been around for years for
    guitars. They're damned neat, but most people
    no matter what they play, be it metal, punk,
    blues or country, will eventually come to realize
    that life is good w/ a> a guitar that's quality,
    b> a stompbox or two, c> a good amp. ethernet be
    damned.

    and oh yeah. my 79 strat plays better than your
    les paul.

    (hey, stupid ass OS wars always start here, couldn't resist)
    • My Schecter beats everyone's guitar :) best guitars made, if only they weren't made in Korea.

      of course, the USA strat that's waiting on me at the Fedex dispatch might trump that, but as of right now, Schecter 0wnz j00... muhuahhahaha

  • will musicians buy this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lxy ( 80823 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:46PM (#2654838) Journal
    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.

    • Re:will musicians buy this? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:00PM (#2654954)
      Yeah, and a lot of those same musicians want a volume knob they can turn up to eleven.
    • As a guitarist my self, I can pretty much agree with you. I , and most of the guitarists i know, are into analog circuit effects an tube powered amps. There is just more warmth.. its not as clean.

      however there are quite a few of dsp's that simulate vintage amps.. Line 6's POD and amps, Fender Cyber twin.

      while these do sound pretty impressive and do give some extra flexibility, they still don't match a Class A amp.

      I could not see any musicina in the near future pluging cat 5 into their guitar.. maybe into a set of mic pres that then went to the mixer to clean the mass of cables up .. or for midi and such.

      just my thoughts.
  • to "live" music over the internet!

    Heck 4 and 8 tracks will be a thing of the past if this goes. Instead of hooking your guitars up to a 4 track and then making recording off of that for your demo, you now go straight into your computer.... your basic studio setup but with digital quality sound and digital output onto a demo CD....

    The more I write the more I like the idea....

    Better start learning where to put my finger for that A chord now....

    • Recording to PC sucks. The consumer applications of this will probably be throttled anyway (knowing Gibson, an old company that believes in tiered products) so you won't get nearly what a pro gets.
  • Okay, so how long until cable Internet providers kludge up a protocol to send audio data over MAGIC, use a software V.90 modem implementation treating the audio packets like an analogue phone line, and run PPP on top of that?

  • Guitars and Ethernet (Score:4, Funny)

    by zangdesign ( 462534 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:50PM (#2654876) Journal
    I can see the headlines now:

    "Unnamed Hacker 'ownz' Ted Nugent - 200 fans hospitalized for serious inner ear bleading.

    "The Nuge was not available for comment as authorities are investigating allegations that a hacker had broken security on Ted Nugent's favorite guitar. Apparently, the attack caused the amplifier stack to overload, drawing about 800,000 watts for approximately 10 seconds. The resulting decibel levels were off the scale and one spectator described it as "WHAT? WHAT WAS THE QUESTION? WHAT?!". Several fans were hospitalized in critical condition - surgeons are even now trying to figure out how to re-sect bones that have been 'pulverized by hypersonic forces."

    This post copyrighted, patented, folded, spindled and mutilated. If you live in the EU, even reading it may be illegal. If you live in France, you probably wouldn't get it anyway.

  • packet solos... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by silversurf ( 34707 )
    What really gives me pause about this is that most musicians I know can barely figure out their effects pedals, let alone get their amps setup right; I don't know how they're going to deal with ethernet (and some of these guys are pretty accomplished).

    I can see it now; the lead, rhythm and bass guitarists on stage battling for QoS priority on the switch.

    Whatever you do don't let the drummers know about this, the last thing we need is networked drums. Drummers hog enough of the audio spectrum, stage and free beer as it is, we don't need them hogging bandwidth also.

    I say this out of total love and respect for my musician friends of course.

    -silversurf

  • Snakeoil (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mononoke ( 88668 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:55PM (#2654909) Homepage Journal
    Gibson also says to not be surprised to see Ethernet ports on guitars within the next 12 to 18 months.
    The combo instrument business (instruments, amps, etc. for your typical garage band) is the largest snakeoil business in the world. Out-of-this-world inventions show up here all the time, and every rockstar wannabe will save up money from his lawn-mowing job to buy whatever latest piece of crap is marketed to make him think he can be the next Eddie VanHalen. Guess what: Two years from now the cool crap will be old worthless crap because it didn't do anything but make money for the local music store.

    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.)

    • Re:Snakeoil (Score:2, Interesting)

      by proj_2501 ( 78149 )
      Actually that Roland guitar synth is really quite cool, and it still connects to your guitar amp.

    • Re:Snakeoil (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

      • Re:Snakeoil (Score:5, Funny)

        by Sabalon ( 1684 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:49PM (#2655310)
        I dunno. I still think the best sound is a mic in front of the amp. Line-out's on amps just don't sound right. I seriously doubt that ethernet out would sound any better.

        Now...if you could place an ethernet mic in front of the amp with the syncing on it, that'd be cool - at least until:

        "Illegal Operation: device eth0 detected "Stairway to Heaven". Port disconnected.

        No Stairway - denied!

    • The combo instrument business (instruments, amps, etc. for your typical garage band) is the largest snakeoil business in the world. Out-of-this-world inventions show up here all the time, and every rockstar wannabe will save up money from his lawn-mowing job to buy whatever latest piece of crap is marketed to make him think he can be the next Eddie VanHalen.

      Wrong, the biggest snakeoil business is the golf business. Both are dirty, though - one takes advantage of dumb teenagers, the other takes advantage of insecure middle managers.

    • Re:Snakeoil (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rho ( 6063 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @03:38PM (#2655647) Journal

      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...

  • Confused? Maybe this will clear things up. (Score:5, Informative)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @01:59PM (#2654945) Homepage
    MIDI is not what they are talking about here. They are talking about audio. MIDI is not audio, but rather 'piano roll'. The only data being sent to the sequencer/keyboard is which notes to play, and when. Conversely, audio is the actual audio signal generated by the instrument, whether it be a keyboard or a guitar.

    The true value of audio over ethernet is the existing infrastructure (hubs, switchers, etc), coupled with being able to identify 'devices' hooked up to your setup. Mixers, be them software or hardware mixers, that are 'ethernet aware' would be able to auto-assign the devices name that an instrument reports itself as to the network to faders and knobs in your setup. Currently, you have to know which wires are going from which instruments into what audio-ins on your hardware/software mixer/multitrak; in order to fade a guitar line, for instance, you need to be physically aware of which audio-in the guitar is connected to. This amounts to a huge amount of organizational work for producers/techs, as they must use project software or notebooks to keep track of how various projects are wired up. Some technologies are alleviating these troubles, but from what I understand, its still a pain in many setups to keep track of which songs and projects are wired up which way.

    Hopefully, this Gibson technology would allow producers and sound guys to forget those details, and just assign 'network instruments' to which ever faders they please, without ever having to verify that the guitar was plugged into the correct audio-in, corresponding to the controls (faders, knobs) you wish you use to do your production and mixdowns.

    At least, thats what I get out of it.

    BTW, I am a d'n'b producer with a fairly functional grasp of lo-pro to mid-pro MIDI and audio gear, so while I'm not privvy to the nitty gritty of doing sound for live shows or full rack mixers in-studio, I think I can glean what the true pay off is here, for the sound guys and musicians alike.

    • Re:Confused? Maybe this will clear things up. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:06PM (#2654993) Homepage
      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.
  • A good crack would be to break into someone's guitar and make it play 'Starway to Heaven" over and over and over...

  • I think this will make a good bus for communicating between digital devices (say, a DAT and your computer, or maybe a keyboard/MIDI box and a computer), but it seems to be a pretty crummy way to communicate between a guitar and an amp. (And I am sure as hell not going to record guitar directly into my PC!)

    One good side effect, though, will be "ruggedized" ethernet cables available at my local music store. =)

  • like mLAN? (Score:2, Informative)

    by version5 ( 540999 )
    Sounds like Yamaha's mLAN [yamahasynth.com], which is based on IEEE 1394 (Firewire) and carries 100 audio signals, and 4096 MIDI channels, although I think its proprietary. The TechTV website has no mention of clock information being transferred through Gibson's protocol, or even MIDI. I will be very disappointed if they didn't put those into the spec.

    If hardware manufacturers actually support this protocol, it will be a huge boon to the home studio hobbyist. Imagine, a 32-in/32-out soundcard for the price of an ethernet card! My money is on Yamaha. They already have hardware that supports their standard, including a couple of digital [yamaha.co.uk] mixers [yamaha.co.uk]. If only Gibson and Yamaha would work together on this, we might have a slight hope of interoperable standards.

  • No way this will take off (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:09PM (#2655010)
    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?

  • Ummmm. (Score:2, Funny)

    by lumpenprole ( 114780 )
    "As soon as you plug the guitar in to the Ethernet port or whatever instrument it is, it'll come up 'Nate's guitar,'" Yaekel said. "Just like in Ethernet, when you plug into an Ethernet hub, you're going to see your computer's name on the network."

    When's the last time this guy tried to set up a network in real life? And where the hell does he think he's going to get ethernet savvy roadies?
    The last roadies I worked with exposed a port every time they bent over to tape down a cord, but it wasn't ethernet.

  • Nope, will not work (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cheezit ( 133765 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:20PM (#2655086) Homepage
    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.

  • Spinal Tap 2003 (Score:5, Funny)

    by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:31PM (#2655164)
    "These go to 802.11!"
    • Oh, that's great!

      I actually went to see Spinal Tap a few months ago at "Carnegie Fucking Hall," as Derek put it, and Nigel's guitar was a masterpiece. On the body, under the strings, was all pickups - probably a dozen (sorry, eleven.) Below that were a speedometer and tachometer, and the body also had exhaust pipes pointing to the other end.

  • I'm sure all 3 of my chords would sound ... well, just as bad, but digital.
    In entertainment news today, it was revealed that CmdrTaco is in fact the new lead guitarist for Limp Bizkit. Widespread rumors suggest that Jon Katz may be Fred Durst in disguise.

  • Now what we need... (Score:4, Funny)

    by seanmeister ( 156224 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:46PM (#2655284)
    Now what we need is some kind of Napster-type client so we can bypass CD's and steal Metallica tunes directly from James Hetfield's guitar!

  • hackers (Score:3, Funny)

    by brer_rabbit ( 195413 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:47PM (#2655286) Journal
    I guess my license plate reading "I hacked the Gibson", in reference to the awful movie Hackers [imdb.com], will have an entirely new meaning.
  • Why? Why not wireless networking? That would make setup even simpler.
    • Why not? Granted, 802.11b would never be sufficient for Pink Floyd or Metallica but, if you went with 802.11a you might have something going.

      On-board you would have to take the native analog signal and digitize it but hey, isn't that what MIDI is for? Build in a few extra synthesizer channels and you can make that Stratocaster sound like the Boston Pops.

      On the networking side, config your network to be restricted to the actual hardware addresses of the WNICs in the equipment inventory and you should be able to lock out most or all unwanted activity.

  • The new sound checks (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sabalon ( 1684 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:54PM (#2655343)
    circa 1983: "check check 1 2 check check 1 2"
    circa 2005: "traceroute traceroute"

  • good for digital equipment, but not guitar (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pinball Wizard ( 161942 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @02:57PM (#2655366) Homepage Journal
    Digital needs to get much better before it can replace tube guitar amps. None of the modeling amps sound as good as an all-tube Fender or Marshall.


    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.

  • Digital schmidgital (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 8bit ( 127134 )
    Audio should ALWAYS be analog for the best quality. Sure sure, digital protects against noise, but you'll never get the same quality. You always gotta drop information with digital music, 44000 samples a second for example.

    Then again any difference between analog and digital quality is purely theoretical...I surely wouldn't notice the difference.

  • It looks very much like this is an open source re-implementation of cobranet [peakaudio.com] which is a closed source per-audio-channel license fee system used in existing installations at Tokyo Disney Seas [wdwmagic.com]

    This is very exciting and goes far beyond just putting an ethernet connector on a guitar.

    It is not just streaming audio - synchronized sample clocks are the hardest part about a system like this, since you can and do have multiple transmitters that need to be sample synchronous. That is why they have to use a 'modified' ethernet protocol.

    Take a look at Level Control Systems [lcsaudio.com] for the type of existing high end audio DSP gear that works with cobranet.

    disclaimer: I work with Level Control Systems --jeff

  • This is ingenious, so long as it truly IS low/no latency.

    When I set up a stage show now, I usually run 24 returns and 6 sends from the board. Industrially, that's a small snake, but it still weighs a ton. Imagine being able to run the whole thing on a single Cat5 ? _AND_ when my guys plug in their gear, there's no guessing which return they're in -- "Brent's Guitar" will henceforth always be in channel 8 or whatever.

    Too bad I won't be able to afford this until the 3 next best things come out.

  • the case for ethernet speakers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by option8 ( 16509 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @03:54PM (#2655755) Homepage
    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?
  • While I'm skeptical as regards Gibson's market targeting with this tech, we may get some good mechanical design out of it.

    A notorious problem for musical applications of computer-oriented communication layers (e.g. Firewire, USB, 10/100B-T, etc.) is the lack of robustness of the connectors and/or cables. Various computer music authors have written papers addressing this very issue. (e.g. search CCRMA's archives for a repurposing of AES/EBU for non-audio musical data.) Perhaps Gibson will come up with a *really* robust ethernet mechanical connector design and cabling that can withstand many harsh connect/disconnect cycles and other physical stresses that live guitarists will put on their equipment.

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