Paul White talks to Symetrix President Dane Butcher about the birth of a new PC hardware range, Lucid, intended to open up the world of high‑quality computer‑based digital audio at an affordable price.
Lucid is a brand new name in digital audio, though it comes under the design and manufacturing umbrella of Symetrix, the well‑known US signal processing company. I arranged to meet Dane Butcher, President of the company, at their Seattle headquarters, where he explained the philosophy and direction of the new line. I began by asking him why he felt the need to develop a new brand name for the Lucid range of products rather than marketing them under the Symetrix name.
"Our existing Symetrix brand products serve a number of different audio markets, and though that's great, you also tend to dilute your marketing efforts because of that. With Lucid, we had a singular vision based on the ubiquitous Personal Computer music platform, which is getting more powerful at an ever‑faster rate. Having had a personal interest in computer‑based audio for the past 10 years or so, and having made some investments into those markets already, we decided to set up a new brand to pursue the desktop audio market.
"Our core expertise is the design of hardware and digital signal processing. We don't have expertise in specialised desktop audio software, but we perceive a need for more hardware‑specific peripherals to PCs, as more sophisticated alternatives to inexpensive soundcards. We're looking at all kinds of professional users, from multimedia to film production, and there are a number of software companies making hard disk editors and software plug‑ins that have made some very creative and affordable products. We simply want to make it easier for the user to integrate those products into the studio — whatever type of studio that may be — by providing a hardware platform for digital audio interfacing and processing.
"Two years ago we didn't have the integrated MIDI + Audio packages that we do now — we had audio and we had MIDI, but rarely together. The computer still seems a little out of place in most studios, other than in its role as a music sequencer. Conventional studio equipment, such as ADATs, set the tone for the whole studio and how you work in it — computers look after the MIDI side of things, but still, relatively few studios use their computers for audio. The software people have the software to do it — it's just a matter of getting the hardware at the right price, and to the right formula."
In At The Entry Level
What are you introducing with Lucid that isn't already available from companies like Digidesign or from the better soundcards?
"We're starting with a couple of low‑cost, entry‑level devices, one of which is a stand‑alone, 20‑bit A/D and D/A converter with both S/PDIF and AES/EBU ports, the ADA1000. Internally supported sample rates are 44.1kHz and 48kHz, with 32kHz added for the benefit of the broadcast market. Because the system is 20‑bit, we'll be able to bring a system to market with in excess of 100dB dynamic range. This will be a cost‑effective model, and won't include features like dithering — the US retail price is $599 [see info at the end of this article for UK pricing of both products — Ed]. Symetrix already make a sophisticated 20‑bit D/A converter with dithering and noise‑shaping, but that addresses a different market. The second product we've announced is a NuBus card, the NB24, which simply functions as an S/PDIF interface, and will work under Apple's Sound Manager. This will allow the existing user bases of NuBus Macs to interface with our A‑to‑D/D‑to‑A converter."
So, if I'm currently using one of the major sequencer packages that supports audio, what will I need to make it work with your hardware?
"We have developed a driver which simply sits in your PC's System folder and your sequencer will see it. We went for the NuBus card first because of the size of the existing user base. This card carries a $399 retail price, and we have a second card in the planning stage, which will address the Mac and PC PCI platforms."
The Future
One thing that seems to bother a lot of SOS readers is that the majority of budget hard disk systems provide only stereo in, stereo out operation, yet what people really want are multiple outputs — which are normally expensive. Are you planning anything to help these people?
"Though our first product is a 2‑channel interface, what you mention is the logical next step, and we've put a lot of thought into it. We think that people in the music market need cost‑effective hard disk recording. Two tracks is OK for stereo editing, multimedia or for entry‑level music, but in terms of interfacing for the real world, where music and post‑production people are concerned, multiple outputs are obviously demanded."
Will this include ADAT and DA88 interfaces?
"Absolutely. We've signed up for licenses for both those formats, and we think it very important to be able to interface with those machines. These may not be on the first generation of interfaces, but they're planned."
The soundcard as we know it is remarkably short on DSP power...
I imagine that some user demands come as a result of habits picked up recording on traditional equipment. What you think you want isn't always the same as what you need — for example, if you have a system with built‑in mixing, you can often get by quite happily with two main outputs and two aux send outputs.
"Exactly. But the computer will have to move up to how people want to work. It's like I was saying about bringing the computer into studios — it gets used for MIDI, but it doesn't get used for audio so much, because it doesn't have those blocks of eight outputs. You can buy an interface to do the job, but they're expensive."
They seem more expensive now that the audio sequencing packages themselves are so cheap and offer so many DSP‑driven features.
"Yeah, there's a couple of things that drive our efforts into this market, and one is DSP power. The soundcard as we know it is remarkably short on DSP power, and though multimedia cards and software make token gestures towards audio, the computer industry has no interest in becoming too vertical in supporting any one discipline. They have to remain general‑purpose — which means there'll always be an opportunity to provide audio DSP cards that interface with the computer. That's one area where we see opportunities. The other area is in multi‑channel breakout boxes — but we're staying away from the software side of the market."
How difficult is it to provide DSP power that other software companies can access effectively?
"Our first card is a simple interface, and we're probably not going to open that up in terms of DSP, but on our subsequent products, there will be APIs provided for companies that we're developing relationships with. API is an acronym for 'Application Programming Interface', which in our case, will allow third‑party developers — or DEVs — to load their DSP code onto the NB24 board. Our job is to provide as much raw horsepower as possible, so the software writers can decide how the DSP is applied. This is primarily looking at the plug‑in market, but that's not to discount the need for acceleration of audio or processors. You get a fair amount of processing power on a Mac 8500 or 9500 CPU board, but there's always room for acceleration."
Will it always be a case of third‑party companies writing specific software for your cards, or can it be structured so that your cards can run existing software?
"I don't really know whether anyone could write a bridging utility to do that with current plug‑ins or not, but when I spoke to a leading plug‑in development company, they started to salivate at the prospect of what Lucid offers. Apparently the mechanics of moving their algorithms onto a different hardware platform are quite minimal, given that the DSP card also has enough onboard RAM. Basically, you give the software designers the right hardware, and there's no problem."
PC Problematica
When you start designing for PCs rather than the existing NuBus Macs, it seems that installing multiple cards can be problematic for the user.
"There's nothing much we can do at the card end to simplify that situation — our feeling is that some of the DSP power may end up being on the buss and some of it may be on the end of a wire — it may be distributed DSP. It doesn't all have to be inside the computer. With the PCI buss, you want to put as much inside the computer as you can, but you do have some options to put some of it outside."
Once you go the route of the virtual recording studio, it's only natural that you'll want to add some synth cards to provide a complete music package. By the time you've done this, you could end up with more cards than the PC can accommodate — so does this lead us back to the idea of the studio of the future being based around an external expansion chassis filled with PCI cards?
"We have to take things one step at a time. Our friends at Lone Wolf had a vision of all this distributed processing around the studio, but it turned out to be a formidable challenge. Anybody who thinks that we are not at the mercy of the computer companies is living in an absolute fantasy world. All we can do is watch and analyse any new thing that comes out. The Universal Serial bus for example — OK, what are we going to do with it? It's a little wimpy and it may make a fine control buss — I could be shown to be wrong, but I don't think we need to be putting audio down it. But no doubt other audio companies will."
At the moment, the PC is a tremendously unfriendly environment in terms of RF. It's hard to imagine how some of these systems pass the CE test, but I guess they do.
On the subject of being at the mercy of computer companies, they seem to have established a habit of changing their card slot format without considering the implications for either users or manufacturers. Surely this is another argument for keeping as much processing power externally as possible?
"That's a good point and I fully agree. We certainly don't intend to dismiss the idea of putting some of the DSP out at the end of cables."
On the hardware side, there are practical reasons for putting your converters in external boxes (for example, to eliminate crosstalk from the computer circuitry itself), but as far as the rest of the system goes, it seems most cost‑effective to put it on cards which reside either inside the computer or inside some external hardware. Is that how you see the situation?
"At the moment, the PC is a tremendously unfriendly environment in terms of RF. It's hard to imagine how some of these systems pass the CE test, but I guess they do. The low end of the market — soundcards, the low‑end audio I/O cards and the audio that comes built into the Apple Macintosh — is very much compromised by this. At best, you're lucky to get the equivalent of 14‑bit resolution out of them, and much depends what's plugged in adjacent to them."
Raising The Standard
"Over the last 10 years, I've been in awe of the elevation in standards of the listening public. Every year, people get more discriminating, and for that we can thank things like Dolby in the cinema — also, TV is getting better, and will get even better soon with HDTV. Because of this, the quality of low‑end soundcards is becoming simply unacceptable to a larger number of people."
But the low‑end cards are very cheap — they cost perhaps 10 percent of the sales tax on a professional product, yet some users still complain when they don't perceive the results as professional quality.
"The entry‑level musician will always be there, but we're hoping to be not a lot more expensive than what's currently available to them, so that they can step up in quality quite cost‑effectively. After all, their ears are already educated to that level of quality — it's just their bank balances that are a little short. Just think of the quality advances brought about by products such as ADAT and DA88 — just a few years ago, people didn't have access to the sound quality they do now."
So, you perceive Lucid as, effectively, a sound quality upgrade? You can still use the same MIDI + Audio sequencer as before — it's not a case of scrapping everything and starting again?
"Exactly — with our Mac card, it's designed to work with all existing applications. You take a disk, install our driver, and now you're going through our digital audio port. There are specialised exceptions such as Digidesign's Sound Designer which requires their hardware to work, but I think Session 2.0 will work OK because it can run via Apple's Sound Manager. Those supporting Apple's Sound Manager include Opcode, Macromedia [makers of Deck — Ed], Emagic, Bias [makers of Peak — Ed] and Steinberg, so most of the major players are covered."
Are you likely to implement any of your existing analogue Symetrix products in DSP form within the Lucid range?
"That's not something we've thought about — I feel that when it comes to computer audio, the plug‑in software approach is the way things are going. But I do think there should be more affordable sample rate converters on the market — nobody seems to be doing them, so that's one area we could move into."