Formats-R-Us...

I was reading about the new LIQUID4PRE from Focusrite (note to those self-same guys: CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!!!) and I discovered that, despite the fact that I read Mix cover-to-cover every month, there’s Yet Another Digital Audio Format out there that I knew nothing about. And I was just getting my head around MADI.

This is the first product I’ve heard of (but obviously far from the first) to come with something called “EtherSound,” which, as the name implies, 64 channels of High Falutin’ Digital Audio over a CAT5 cable, with a purported 6-sample latency. Obviously, that six samples is only the EtherSound to EtherSound communication. A/D and D/A convertors generally take a little time to do their thing, so you can go ahead and add whatever that is to the final number (the Apogee Rosetta, for example, takes 4ms for a round-trip…) plus whatever you’re using to turn EtherSound in to Shit That Shows Up In Your DAW is probably gonna add a couple MS, so don’t let that 1.25ms latency figure go to your head.

Anywho, while this is nifty and all, it’s like Blu-Ray v. HD-DVD. I don’t want to buy anything ’til I know that everything can talk to everything else. But my purpose here is merely to inform, albeit with a lot of local color, so to that end, here’s the EtherSound page, and I’ll go get a root canal tomorrow rather than actually read technical papers on digital audio transmission. But the general idea is: CAT5 cable, 64 channels bi-directional. Whee. Now Monster can come out with a $300 EtherSound-Ready cable. Science marches on.