Open Source, Open Architecture!

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I think digital audio has to be approached in an entirely different way, otherwise it is just consumerism. Digital technology offers great potential in its lossless copying, transmission, and processing. But we, the users, have to have control over what the equipment does, not marketeers.

Digital equipment offers this possibility too, but only if we can control the software.

Lets step back a bit here. Look at personal computers. These came on to the market in the 70's. Everyone liked them because they can do anything, so long as you can write or obtain a program. Over the decades, largely due to M$, personal computers have become less and less flexible, and more like fixed function appliances. Yes, more people use them, but as appliances.

Look at digital audio. It has never been flexible. It should be.

Imagine the following: You have a published architecture. It has a box, with battery backup for software, or Flash for software. It has an interface. It is your digital control preamp, or your 5.1 or 7.1 reciever. You decide what it does! You decide how it does tone controls. You decide about Dolby and THX. You decide what it does with the surround and center channels. You decide everything about bass and subwoofer management. You can change all this with just a few buttons. The only limit is its computational power.

Sometimes you want to use delay on the surrounds, to simulate a big room. Sometimes you want bandwidth limited surrounds. Sometimes you want to be able to shunt LF back to the Left and Right. Sometimes you want it to go to a global subwoofer. Sometimes you might have a full range cener speaker. Sometimes you might want two tiers of bass management. Sometimes you might want room compensation.

Sometimes you want complex eq. Sometimes you want the Lucas THX compensation. Sometimes you might want sound compression, there really is no way to watch these movies now without having some of it be real real loud, without either compression or subtitles.

The point is, we should be in control!

Marketeers have been selling us menu options, things that we should have a much much greater deal of control over! These various approaches are things we should be inventing, not marketeers. Digital audio is turning us into cell phone bimbos!

The technology is good. The implementation has not been.

Open source, open architecture is the solution. PCs only took off because it worked out that way. All kinds of user groups, then third party commerical sources jumped in, once there was an open standard. It lasted until M$ was able to lock it up.

With digital audio, especially these control preamps and surround decoders, we have to be incharge.

You won't have to write the software yourself. Its a combination of third party commercial sources, and user and hobby groups, as well as individuals

This is how it should be! It should not be fixed function gimick boxes.

Once such a standard exists, we can presure industry to only sell that which is compatible. This will cover pro and home gear.

The fact that many consumers do not care is irrelevant. Once a standard is established, only cheapie junk will deviate from it.

As an example, look at midi. No one owns that. It works because manuf. were forced to comply by pressure.

Digital should give us more capability, more control, more options, not less.

Is anyone doing anything like this? Any ideas about this?

Of course this also applies to digital musical instruments. And to digital home recording.

A PC can be used for software writing and compiling and loading. Said PC could also handle play lists and much more.

Once the hardware and software are open, there really is no limit!:D
 
Another PC Evangelist. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

I say lets not. Things are fine as they are. The last thing needed is the bloated PC mentality. If you want excess by all means build your audio PC but have no illusions that it is about audio. It is all about the PC.
What is it about PC people that drives their need for one thing to do everything and not particularly well at that.
 
I didn't say that an open source and open architecture audio system had to be built around a Personal Computer, PC.

At best, I don't think it should be. It should be some other kind of box with no hard disk and no fan.

It should also have its own primary controls.

The PC comes into play as a way of loading new software into it, like from the internet, or that you write yourself.

I'm saying that digital offers lots of potential, but audio hobbyests need to be in charge of their own systems, not the corporate marketeers.

The sound quality will be not better and no worse with what I am proposing. Its just that we each get to control exactly how the system works for ourselves.
 
zenmasterbrian said:
Lets step back a bit here. Look at personal computers. These came on to the market in the 70's. Everyone liked them because they can do anything, so long as you can write or obtain a program. Over the decades, largely due to M$, personal computers have become less and less flexible, and more like fixed function appliances. Yes, more people use them, but as appliances.

I think you have it backwards. It is because of the standardization and backward compatibility enforced by Wintel’s dominance that personal computers can do anything. That wasn’t the case in the 70’s when there were dozens of incompatible disk formats, memory managers, and I/O interfaces. Every software vendor had their proprietary user interface and programming language extensions.

I just updated one of many programs I created years ago to do whatever I want it to do with regard to digital audio and M$ has not hindered me in any way. In fact, it is because of M$ that I have powerful and inexpensive software development tools and standardized interfaces that allow my software to run on any 32- or 64-bit Wintel computer.

zenmasterbrian said:
Look at digital audio. It has never been flexible. It should be.

How is digital audio inflexible? The data formats are well known. I can read the contents of any digital audio media or intercept its data stream and manipulate the data to my hearts content. Aside from DRM, which can always be cracked or circumvented, there is nothing closed, secret, or inaccessible about digital audio. What’s stopping you from doing what every you want to do?

zenmasterbrian said:
lets talk about open source for digital audio!

OK, What are you going to contribute to digital audio open source? I think you’re one of those open source advocates who wants other to do the work just so you can get free software.
 
rfbrw, you are not in control of the digital processing. This is most important after the basic decoding is done from you CD or DVD.

The kinds of things you could have better control over, but do not, are equalization, surround channel synthesis, how low bass is routed through front speakers or your .1 channel, how the Lucas Film THX compensation is done, use of center speaker when listening to 2 channel sources, even synthesis of stereo when you have your own recording mixed down to mono.

With digital you could do darn near anything, just by selecting the options. You could have a 13 band graphic eq one minute. You could have a tone control only the next, you could then have nothing, then you could have the Lucas film THX compensation.

You could have compression, which as the dynamic range of digital sources has expanded, is sometimes necessary to keep it listenable.

Right now, you get what ever the marketeer's put into your box. Its an overly simplistic user interface, designed for a price range. If its cheap, its targeted to girls. If its expensive, it does more, but not that much. You rarely have control of the actual parameters, just fixed options, surround modes.

Next year they will sell you a new version, with different gimcks.

We should be in charge, not the marketeers.:D
 
If I want digital eq, I can build it. There are other forms of processing also open to those with the ability but just because one can doesn't mean one should. Fortunately for me, I care not a jot for compressed formats and have no need for surround sound. But if it bothers you that much, don't let us naysayers put you off building your own SDDS codec.
 
The SACD and DVD-A hardly give the consumer much freedom. The CD, on the other hand, does offer control and portability, and mp3 is our open source format.

But lets get to the real issues. Even if we ignore all the other obstacles, the open source community has often been its own biggest enemy. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but despite being this colossus, it's the most progressive software manufacturer out there when it comes to interaction design. Techies and engineers have proven they are incapable of making usable software for anyone but techies and engineers. This is my favourite clueless techie quote:

"The question remains though, whether AOL can overcome the reputation as consumer-oriented business. This will determine whether Case's hopes for penetrating the e-commerce market will succeed. The Sun phase of the deal may be enough to reassure the hardcore techies who worries about what a consumer outfit like AOL might do to the technically oriented Netscape operation."

The quote is from the Networker Magazine, March 1999.

I want nothing to do with the backward and narrow-minded people in the open source community. They would have had something to offer if this had been the 1970s, when the PC looked like a good idea. And they will remain dinosaurs until they start to evolve.

Open source might still have a future, but then only as a niche for a small group of music nerds. Everybody else will stay away, as they do from Firefox and Linux. (Make no mistake. I would love to see a Firefox and Linux OS that doesn't suck. But I know that won't happen in my lifetime.) Not that Firefox and Linux matter in this post-PC world. A decade from now nobody is going to have a PC in their home and probably not even in the workplace. The Japanese skipped the PC and jumped directly to the cell phone. And everything we see in Japan we see here a decade later.
 
phn said:

The Japanese skipped the PC and jumped directly to the cell phone. And everything we see in Japan we see here a decade later.

You're joking, right? I have lived there and visit frequently and have witnessed with my own eyes the pile up of PCs on people's desks and in unused corners of offices (it costs too much to have it hauled away, so they pile it up). The truth is they are about 10 years behind the US when it comes to PCs. They were very slow to adopt the PC because they couldn't handle the added productivity. Japan has very poor social welfare and the sudden jump in productivity that would have occured would have put a lot of people out of work. After the stock market/real estate crash in 91/92 and a lot of people were thrown out of work anyway, they were free to start computerizing.

Cell phones replace PCs? You can't be serious. Have you ever tried to do any useful work on a cell phone? I don't think there are millions of Japanese designing buildings, putting together power-point presentations, editing audio/video/photos and a zillion other apps on their cell phones, and I don't think they ever will.

Japanese cell phone system technology is generally better than the US, mainly because of the over-population/density of Japan. The entire country is about the size of California, but has early the same population as the US. If you werre going to install a system to provide nation-wide cell coverage for everyone, where do you think it would be cheaper to do so?

As far as seeing things here a decade after the Japanese- you're dead wrong. The US market was the driving force for most Japanese manufacturing for many years. They made stuff for export that you simply did not find in Japan. I first moved to Japan in the late 80s. At the time I expected to see the place looking like something from 20 years in the future. When I got there I found it was essentially a third-world country in terms of the way people lived. They were sending all the cool stuff to the US and using almost none of it. You could buy Japanese products in the US cheaper than you could get them in Japan. Now, snce many of Japan's manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and the government has put policies to promote domestic consumption in place, there seems to be more of a balance between Japan and the US with regard to technology use.

Get real, dude!

I_F
 
Nobody is comparing computers to a cell phone. Writing a simple Word document would be a chore in a cell phone.

The word "computer" isn't very useful nowadays. Most electronic applications today are computers that perform limited and specialized tasks.
 
phn said:
Nobody is comparing computers to a cell phone. Writing a simple Word document would be a chore in a cell phone.

The word "computer" isn't very useful nowadays. Most electronic applications today are computers that perform limited and specialized tasks.


Since you have declared the PC obsolete what are we going to run our programs on?
 
zenmasterbrian said:
Once we can define a target hardware, then we can start talking about software. This hardware could be something derived from a commerical product.

It could be derived from something that is partially open already.


Let me see if I have this right.
You wish to take a system that functions adequately using readily available hardware and throw that out. You would then replace it with an over-specified non specific system that has to be bent in to doing a task for which there already exists perfectly adequate hardware just so you can place a layer of unnecessary software on top.
So instead of i.e. receiver - filter/dac - output stage, I would have each section beholden to some lump running software merrily meddling with the dataflow.

To think I thought the people who came up with the Zone Phone had gone away.
 
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