Swedish musik instument, Clavia the dreadfull.

[The Dark force of dance]

Y-ellow y'all.
  
At 07:25 PM 9/27/97 -0700, BJ wrote:

>Thank you for a most funny and interesting and amusing email...
>It sounds to me that you the great enginer, was in the hands of
>some prozac drug addicted sales people that screwed it all up...:-)

Great engineer(s). There were some far more talented people than I working
on this beast. Some of whom you'd probably know from various EM related
lists. Some you wouldn't. I was only the overall architect of the system. A
bit of an ideas man and responsible for the decisions made at a technical
level. The whole concept was my idea but it needed some very bright people
to take care of the nuts 'n' bolts of the system. And we had some really
bright people. We were even experimenting with fractal compression but we
discovered it was largely a hoax. The compression equivalent to cold fusion.
 
>You said evolution...ahh the people that made the Evolution EVS1 dsp
>machine?

Yeop. They be it. The EVS1 is an FM machine. Only 3 operators per voice but
the combinations of those 3 operators make yamaha's implementation look a
bit lame. It's actually a very nice box. 

>It sound's to me that your system was/is some kind of the system
>fairlight are
>doing today with their HD recording main frame system, but they doing it
>for sale at extremly high price? Or more like the Kyma systems!

Let me put it this way. It wouldn't be like any synth you'd ever seen
before. It would be like _every_ synth you'd ever seen before. If it could
be synthesized, this thing could synthesize it. 32 times over in fact.

At 11:50 AM 9/29/97 +1000, Paul Perry wrote:

>.....sad story.......
>
>.......well I don't know that there would have been anything actually
>patentable here......using a particular chip to do something that has
>been done before isn't patentable no matter how elegant.....

Um well perhaps I didn't make myself clear. We were messing with 96Ks but
ran into the bottle neck described above. The only good thing that these
prozac junkies did was pressure me into coming up with a far better
solution. I was pretty pissed off till I did a little lateral thinking and
designed the architecture for an entirely new DSP concept. The details of
which I've deliberately withheld for obvious reasons. Absolutely patentable.
This was a total hardware solution as opposed to a mere software solution.
I'm a hardware head. What can I say. :) Let me put it this way. This was a
DSP chip that didn't need an operating system. Hell it hardly needed
software for that matter. Not only was it powerful enough to do 32 channels
of what ever takes your fancy but writing the code for it would have been
easy enough for the average joe to concoct on her PC at home.

I'd been looking at the way Gravis had gone about their business. I'm sure
these guys are fully paid, card carrying members of the free software
foundation. The GUS is far from being a technically great sound card. It
uses a sample playback engine that is 13 years old. Originally developed in
a consortium between Ensoniques and Apple. Used in the apple ][ GS in fact.
As sample engines go, it's pretty lame. But what made is so popular was that
gravis actively encouraged hackers to mess with it. It was the first PC
sound card to support active MOD files. It has a huge following for
MOD/TRACKER stuff alone. But they freely supplied circuit diagrams, and SDKs
that allowed both hardware and software hackers to get into this stuff. And
when they did, all this additional, backyard development was in turn,
published on web sites so that even more people had access to it.

Compare that to Creati-Flabs who won't even publish the information on
programming the parameters in their effects processor chips. Many people
have made some good guesses but at last count there were something like 32
parameters undefined. And some of the ones that have been defines have some
strange radix. Creati-Flabs weren't even going to tell us that they had
built in digital EQ. Which they'd set in the factory to some rediculous
response. It was only that some one disassembled the drivers and published
the results. Subsequently they sounded like crap straight out of the box.
Their marketing beats me. The only thing I can think of was that at the
time, they were still trying to flog their EMU boxes. Which were nothing
more than an AWE card in a 19" rack for 3 grand. And don't get me started on
how Tight assed Total Bitch, err sorry Turlte Beach were with information.
The rule of thumb here is. "Don't buy anything that you can't get a service
manual for unless you absolutely have to. Not even a toaster."

But back to the story. So my concept was to do much the same thing with
G-Frog. Once the chip(s) was/were patented we'd freely publish the
programming information for it. Everything you needed to know. Every last
nut 'n' bolt. We'd develop the basic algorithms to allow it to do sampling
and thus become your basic GM/GS sound card. Along with analogue-subtractive
emulation and my personal fave, Re-synthesis. Oh and probably a vocoder as
well. And we'd even publish the code to do all that. Even supplying freely,
an assembler for it. Then we'd let the users do what ever they wanted with
it. If they wanted to port some sort of synthesis to it, no matter how
weird, they would be freely able to do so. And they'd have the tools with
which to do it. We, in turn, would provide them a web site where they can
share their ideas. It would also lead the way for thrid party manufacturers
to refine the card. The way I figured it, was that it was in everyone's
interest to do so. We spend less time on after market development and
everyone has the opportunity to make the system what they need it to be.
Further more, from a marketing point of view, it makes it really simple for
us to follow market trends.

Speaking of which. The marketing people in England at the time were wanting
to make it intrinsically linked to the internet. So there were some people
working on a transport protocol for data specifically for the card.
Including a file system that was something between a MOD/TRACKER file and an
MPEG file. The idea was that it would enable the transport of high quality
music between users in a highly compressed form. And like digital audio it
had the ability for copy protection. The hope was that it might spawn a new
form of music delivery. This format also had a consumer and pro standard.
The pro standard was much like AES/EBU in that whilst it had no copy
protection, it was also capable of a much higher quality and additional
information that would be useful for professional musicians wishing to work
with each other at different ends of the earth. Naturally this format would
be much larger than the consumer format but that would be of no great
problem for people collaborating.

But best laid plans of mice and prozac junkies. It started out to address
some basic needs in the PC sound card market. But wound up as a total
concept. And the investors were looking at a 2 year time frame of
development. So that meant they had to pour more money into it than would be
considered normal. the 2 years development cycle was about right too. It
would be about ready to be released now. Right into a fertile market for
such things. It would easily blow all of the high end stuff out of the
water. Much as the TripleDAT and the new Layla cards are currently doing. I
mean who'd pay 40 grand for a pro-tools set up these days? And people do.
Then they see the tripleDAT. At that point the next sound I usually hear is
the sound of their collective jaws hitting the ground. "three grand" they
say. "But I just spent 40 grand on a pro-tools set up and it doesn't do any
of that." Don't get me wrong, this is not a big add for TripleDAT but I've
only ever used tripleDAT since version 1 and as such I get to do all the
demos for it down here. And I've had this happen to me on so many occasions
now that I'm beginning to wonder what's wrong with these other systems. 

Anyway the point being that our system would have been launched into this
market now which is just itching for something like this. I know I certainly
am. Whilst I like ye olde Nerd Bleed and I really love the Kawai K5K, which
I _did_ use on the CD, none of these instruments come very close to my
ideal. And because of the kind of money involved in developing such a
system, it's not probably ever going to become a reality.

Kymas and Fairlights and all that stuff don't even scratch the surface.
They're nice but really ancient technology. 

At 07:25 PM 9/27/97 -0700, BJ wrote:

>But if this design still exist(SW/HW)you and your mates could strip the
>hardware
>down some bit,simplyfying the SW and then have another go for the
>market..

Well unfortunately, and I don't mean to be a stick in the mud because I have
talked about that with the evolution people, it's really all or nothing.
Stripping the system down renders it to be unpatentable at some point. We
can strip it down a little but it still requires the same development time
and costs. A new chip has to be developed because there is no off-the-shelf
equivalent. To say there's nothing like it in existence is an understatement
and yet the concept is so simple it's scary. The worst part is that
someone's bound to come up with it sooner or later. Clavia have only come up
with part of the picture so far but even then they're in the wrong ball park
heading in the wrong direction. Great as it may be. I mean I wouldn't mind
one and If I ever get back on top I surely will.

At 07:59 PM 9/27/97 -0700, BJ wrote:
>I did found a tiny tiny picture at
>http://www2.gist.net.au/~aek/elecdsgn.htm
>of your super duper DSP96K sound card.
>
>Do you still run AEK AUDIO c/o ?

That's an interesting question. And one for which I have no direct answer
to. As is evident from my rantings, I've been very ill over the past year or
more. In fact I had another operation yesterday. My business partner left in
the middle of this but not before he shafted me. And just to make things
even more interesting, our once, so called, 'healthy electronics industry',
has become nothing short of a joke. A cheap caricature of it's former self.
All the good ol' boys have been replaced with real cowbows to the point
where it is impossible to buy technology here. If it wasn't for the great
man, Paul Schreiber, I just wouldn't be able to get anything done at all.
Thanks paul I owe you one. So anyway It's debatable whether I can continue
under such a cloud or just give up. Then again my options are somewhat
limited now so who knows. 

Be absolutely ICebox.
 _ __        _                              
| "_ \      | |         batzman at dove.mtx.net.au / aek at gist.net.au
| |_)/  __ _| |_ ____           ALL ELECTRIC KITCHEN               
|  _ \ / _` | __|___ |  The new AEK CD, Elementary Urban sanity    
| |_) | (_| | |_  / /   is out now on Transmission Communications from
|_,__/ \__,_|\__|/ /    http://brisbane.dialix.com.au:80/~com11
                / ,__   and check out http://www2.gist.net.au/~aek/
Goodfortune    |_____|       Get your SANITY and wear it out.