[sdiy] Radfio Shack

[Richard Wentk]

At 18:54 21/10/2004 -0400, Roy J. Tellason wrote:

>How can you call the PC architecture closed?  If it weren't open,  we 
>wouldn't
>have nearly as much as we do in that realm.  And neither USB or Firewire is
>strictly necessary,  it's just as easy to talk to things through serial and
>parallel ports.  I know that they're "going away" in the consumer
>marketplace, but I also have a lot of older hardware in that regard,  and
>find it very easy to interface those two.

True, but then you're immediately back in legacy land, which is not good. 
And you don't get anything like the bandwidth, which is a more serious 
limitation for high quality audio.

It used to be the case you could get things like ISA breadboards. I don't 
think I've ever seen a PCI breadboard. But even if such a thing existed, 
trying to write a driver for it in Windows would be hell on earth. USB and 
Firewire are even more obscure.

 > That's pretty much where I am with it. (That and having the ideas but no
> > resources to develop them.) For example - hybrid approaches make things
> > like analogue control memories fantastically easy.
>
>Are you talking about being able to read actual analog controls?  Or 
>something
>else that gives the same effect?

You can go as far with hybrid as you want. Personally I think it's a 
no-brainer for interesting LFOs and envelopes. Add a MUXed ADC and you can 
potentially include voltage control of everything much more easily than you 
can using pure analogue.

Then you can start thinking about multi-channel CV recorders/sequencers.

And so on.

Richard