Re: MAX/Computers on Stage

[Kim Flint <kflint@annihilist.com>]

At 10:20 AM -0700 7/19/98, Paul J. Dresher wrote:

>other equipment failure (mostly Eventide problems) but usually when 
>working
>with Max, you are pushing the limits of the machine/program and any little
>glitch (bad AC, mispatch, MIDI voodoo, who knows?) can cause problems.  It
>may be that soon or even now, the computers are more powerful and robust 
>so
>that these problems will become less frequent.

I don't think that you will be seeing computers becoming more robust and
reliable in the near future. If anything, they are getting much worse.
Since I'm intimately involved in designing these infernal things, here's my
take on that:

The entire PC industry is currently fixated on designing extremely low cost
machines. (the sub $1000 thing was a big deal last year, now it's sub $600,
next year it will be $300 - $400....) Since the PC industry is largely
incapable of doing any dramatic changes in design architecture that would
really result in low cost machines, they instead achieve this in the
following ways:

b) eliminate quality every place you can. Customers can't judge those
things, it's better to have a product that is $2 cheaper than one that will
last more than a year or perform reliably. And beleive me, the first target
for cost reduction these days is the audio section.

a) eliminate your profit margins or even operate at a loss, hoping that you
outlive all the competitors and can raise prices again. A lot of companies
are going out of business right now, or leaving the PC industry. The small
companies who would have made high quality systems are mostly in this
category.

Don't think you escape this by buying a higher priced system either, the
attitude pervades all price categories. If you want reliable hardware for
stage use, look into machines designed for inustrial purposes and factory
floors. And expect to pay a lot for it.....


>H3500, Lexicon PCM-70 and EDPs.   Now with the live looping functions and
>MSP, it begins to look much more attractive and unique.  But for stage 
>use,
>the question will always be reliability.

some other things to consider for using computers for live music:

The audio path latency on Macs and PCs can be very long. It can easily be
several hundred milliseconds for audio to be passed into a PC, processed,
and passed out again. Even worse, the latency is not predictable. It can
vary quite a bit. Microsoft has made a big deal about latency performance
on Windows98 with the upcoming Direct Music addition, but it's still going
to be 10ms! that's way longer than any standalone audio processor. (10ms is
a lot of cycles on a 400MHz pentiumII, you gotta wonder what they do with
it all...) And it's still not a guaranteed latency.

A PC might work fine for audio in one direction. The software can
compensate for that. But if you expect it to replace a real-time, stand
alone audio processor, you've got a long wait ahead of you. About your only
hope is to buy a good quality audio accelerator that handles all the audio
on a separate processor with it's own real-time kernal. But if you're doing
that to take the audio away from the PC's tangled OS mess anyway, than why
even use the PC? You're better off buying something designed specifically
to do quality audio processing, and leave the PC in the role of user
interface via midi control.

Another problematic thing with trying to get a general purpose PC do a very
specific task is that these machines are designed with a
least-common-demominator approach. The goal is to make the feature list as
long as possible while staying in a price range. Unfortunately, that's how
people buy PCs, so that's what the industry does. They compare one feature
checklist to another. The pie gets divided up in so many ways that the
amount spent on any single function becomes very small. Again, quality is
way down the priority list. And again, in my experience, graphics
performace gets the biggest slice of pie, audio gets the smallest. It's
amazing how little manufacturers are willing to spend for audio....

oh, and no matter what the hardware is, Windows and MacOS still crash....

kim
(boy, that was negative, eh? You would almost think the company I work for
had to lay off half its staff last week or something...)

______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                   | Looper's Delight
kflint@annihilist.com       | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html
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