[sdiy] MIDI isn't musical : Flame bait?

[Colin Fraser]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Don Tillman [mailto:don at till.com] 
> Sent: 14 January 2002 08:42
> To: colin at colinfraser.com
> Cc: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> Subject: Re: [sdiy] MIDI isn't musical : Flame bait?
> 
> 
>    From: "Colin Fraser" <colin at colinfraser.com>
>    Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 23:53:49 -0000
> 
>    If you can hear the difference between playing a digitally 
> scanned, MIDI
>    interfaced keyboard hooked up to an analogue synth via a 
> CV convertor,
>    and a switched resistor string CV keyboard doing the same, 
> then you've
>    got one superhuman sense of timing.
> 
> It's actually pretty easy; try it!  The human sense of timing really
> is wickedly good.  'Has to do with millions of years of evolution for
> survival -- we're also often able to duck out of the way of an
> oncoming projectile pretty well.

I would guess there's likely to be as much latency imparted by the
scanning rate of a digital keyboard and the CPU in the receiving device
than there is in the inherent MIDI delay.
We're talking about 1ms delay for the first note, then 0.6ms delay for
each subsequent note using running status.
Can you really hear a delay of 1 cycle at the start of a 1kHz tone ?

On the subject of a replacement for MIDI, I'm looking forward to the
arrival of cheap DIY-able mLan devices.
mLan is a 1394 based (400 Mbs,  12800 X midi speed) protocol, that
supports multiple midi and digital audio streams.
You can use thousands of midi channels, alongside > 100 audio channels
over the same 4 wire cable.
Imagine an analogue synth with mLan interface - latency free midi drives
the cv/gate inputs, plus you can patch any of the audio channels to the
input/output adc/dac convertors for multiple patch points (filter input,
mod, ext input, etc.), and route them to any other patch point on your
other synths over the same cable.
All it needs is a mLan to CV/audio convertor unit retrofitted to your
synth.
This sort of stuff will be cheap as it uses technology already a
commodity on PC DV cards and multichannel audio interfaces.
Lovely...

Colin f