Swedish musik instument, Clavia the dreadfull.

[The Dark force of dance]

Y-ellow BJ 'n' all.

At 11:49 AM 9/26/97 -0700, BJ wrote:

>Sooo, they have stolen your design ?
>What vas your design?

Well I guess it was inevitable that someone else would stumble on our
concepts sooner or later. And if those prozac swilling dumb-assed mo-fos
hadn't have scared off the investors it'd be my patent by now. I was talking
to the guys from evolution about it but neither they nor I had the money so
it's pretty much a lost cause. But I'm pleased to hear that Clavia are only
using DSP56Ks where as what I was putting together was an entirely new DSP
concept.

We're talking a single chip here. One that was capable of doing 32 channels
of any kind of synthesis you could be bothered messing with. Including
real-time vocoding. Everything from Sampling to re-synthesis. It was even
GM/GS compatible. Not only that but the chip was crash proof. I mean you
could throw ASCII at it and it would only bog one voice. And then only for a
short time. What Clavia have duplicated was the ability to use plug-ins. And
that's not exactly a new concept. Though it would have been at the time
regarding synthesis. However what they haven't managed to even get close to
was our hardware concepts. When we were working on it we were keeping a
close eye on what Korg were doing with the oasys. But they didn't come close
and we realized they wouldn't.

Incidently there's some good reasoning behind using a DSP56K. That's because
there is a digital audio interface built in. Actually 2 in some version If
memory serves. But we went for the big daddy of 'em all initially. The
DSP96K. This guy makes the 56K look like a Z80. We're talking fast enough to
do real time video effects processing. I mean BVU. We're talking 3D real
time rendering. But this beast doesn't have an I2S bus interface on board so
it has to talk parallel. But that's ok you can always whack a DSP56K on the
end to be it's mouth piece. But we soon realized that even then we would
need probably 6 96Ks to make the system workable. Then we quickly theorized
why Korg's Oasys would never be a reality. To keep that much DSP power from
falling over, and at the same time all working together in real time, you
need a massive operating system. Which sucks a good proportion of your
power. So you have to add more DSPs. The more DSPs you add the more power
required for the operating system. And so on. It never actually plateaus
out. Oops I've given away too much already.

The company, 'G-Frog', (I was not responsible for the name) was in
partnership with another company in England who specialized in mulit-DSP
operating systems but even they couldn't get around this problem. Though
they'd developed a pretty spectacular real-time OS.

But as we were getting into this stuff and I was just getting into Altera
Flex 10K, the really big ones, the Management was getting into Prozac. These
guys became so damn happy the investors from Hong Kong spun around and flew
home. Which is a shame really because if they too had done that much prozac
they probably wouldn't have needed the air fair.

Oh and the whole thing was to be a PCI based PC sound card believe it or
not. The investors were looking for the next generation sound card and I was
only too happy to show 'em how to do it.

>From a marketing point of view the card was modular. You could buy the bare
bones card for about 150Us. This only gives you a blank card with 2 MIDI
interfaces on it. You could then add the digital recording chip, (Yet
another DSP system) and/or the synthesis engine. I think the total cost was
spoze to come in at about the 1200 to 1500 US mark. I don't really remember
exactly. You could have up to 4 of these cards in a system. Which gave you 8
S/PDIF I/os. 8 Stereo (16 channels) of analogue I/O. 8 MIDI ports and 128
voices of what ever kind of synthesis takes your fancy. Plus they were
working on a transport protocol for the internet. Somewhere between a mod
file and MPEGs. We were also working with syntrilium and a real time DSP
version of CoolEdit. Obviously that never happend but I'm pleased to say
that David did include a lot of my ideas into the new CoolEdit Pro.

Of course this is all vapourware now. If these dumb sons of bitches had have
been able to keep their heads it would have been reality by now. We had some
very top minds working on this thing. Most of whom never got paid. Except if
you happened to be in England at the time. It's amazing how much money you
can claim on a business lunch. (not to mention how much of a business lunch
can go up your nose.) But maybe it's just as well. I feel that had this
sucker gone off, it would have changed everything.

And that's the story. Well you did ask. You can see a mockup of the sound
card on the web page incidentally. It's just some marketing/promo stuff we
did. I don't think there's all that much there. It's been so long since I've
been to my own web page it's probably obscured by cobwebs.

Hope this helps.

Oh BTW just for the record. I really like the Nerd Bleed. I didn't have one
available for the CD at the time but had I have done, I surely would have
used it. I was using it next to one o' them Yamaha things a few weeks back.
The deep blue box as opposed to the blue box. Not the glorified GM box the
other one. That's how exciting it was. Can't even remember it's name. Not
even enough to come up with an even slightly comical alternative. Anyway I
thought the Yamaha box was pretty lame by comparison. It was just that the
output assignments sucked. But the version 2 sounds kinda interesting. 

be absolutely Icbeox.
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