While I won't deny that midi has been a great and long lasting standard, syncing clock via cv was always pretty straightforward, you just lacked thru so everything was daisy chained directly.
CV being effectively monoplexed meant a lot of connections to control a lot of parameters on one or more instruments.
Of course, the modular crowd is still happy to live in this world, but that's more an aesthetic choice, imo.
Tunneling the analog control signal into digital packets would be easy, then it's just a matter of picking the best PHY interface to send them around.
Don't worry about sound issues, though. Old hybrid synths (analog generators with digital control and parameters storage) were very recognizable from fully analog ones (purely CV controlled) just because say a pitch bend mapped to a 8 bit sampling of a potentiometer, which translates to 7 bit up and 7 bit down, wouldn't have the minimum quantization to let the listener perceive it as an analog control. Today cheap MCUs allow adding digital control to analog generators, filters, envelopes etc. to a granularity level (16+ bit) so that any realtime variation would be identical sound wise to a fully analog controlled synth. Latency wouldn'b an issue as we're talking about control and not sound generation: MCUs with no or minimal (realtime) OSes would never impose such higher latencies as in virtual instruments etc. Having an ADSR kick like two milliseconds after the key is pressed would hardly be a problem.
Tunneling the analog control signal into digital packets would be easy
Yeah, but at that point, you're already giving up the "analog purity" that analog synth fans love so much. Might as well just use midi; and then you might as well just use soft-synths; and then you might as well just use Propellerhead Reason, so you can have all the flexibility of gate/CV fully virtualized.
I meant the control signal, not the audio signal. The audio stays analog, but the CV once sampled into a digital word can be packed together with other controls, moved around without fear of losing accuracy, and makes trivial for example to record and play it.
Comments
While I won't deny that midi has been a great and long lasting standard, syncing clock via cv was always pretty straightforward, you just lacked thru so everything was daisy chained directly.
CV being effectively monoplexed meant a lot of connections to control a lot of parameters on one or more instruments.
Of course, the modular crowd is still happy to live in this world, but that's more an aesthetic choice, imo.
What's the alternative?
Tunneling the analog control signal into digital packets would be easy, then it's just a matter of picking the best PHY interface to send them around.
Don't worry about sound issues, though. Old hybrid synths (analog generators with digital control and parameters storage) were very recognizable from fully analog ones (purely CV controlled) just because say a pitch bend mapped to a 8 bit sampling of a potentiometer, which translates to 7 bit up and 7 bit down, wouldn't have the minimum quantization to let the listener perceive it as an analog control. Today cheap MCUs allow adding digital control to analog generators, filters, envelopes etc. to a granularity level (16+ bit) so that any realtime variation would be identical sound wise to a fully analog controlled synth. Latency wouldn'b an issue as we're talking about control and not sound generation: MCUs with no or minimal (realtime) OSes would never impose such higher latencies as in virtual instruments etc. Having an ADSR kick like two milliseconds after the key is pressed would hardly be a problem.
Yeah, but at that point, you're already giving up the "analog purity" that analog synth fans love so much. Might as well just use midi; and then you might as well just use soft-synths; and then you might as well just use Propellerhead Reason, so you can have all the flexibility of gate/CV fully virtualized.
I meant the control signal, not the audio signal. The audio stays analog, but the CV once sampled into a digital word can be packed together with other controls, moved around without fear of losing accuracy, and makes trivial for example to record and play it.
I may be wrong, but that sounds kind of like what open sound control(osc) does.
http://opensoundcontrol.org/spec-1_0