By Oliver Masciarotte
 
nce upon a time, in my City By The Bay, where Green Street hits Telegraph Hill, there was a warehouse. On the second floor, a fellow named Philo T. Farnsworth built what was arguably the first all-electronic television system. (Sincere apologies to Vladimir Zworykin.) Thirty years later, the NTSC created what was, again arguably, the worst color television standard to survive until the present. We’ve been stuck with it for over 40 years, and, despite all its problems, it seamlessly delivers “content” to our homes. That will all change when, six years from now, we close the door on analog TV and, hopefully, feel no need to look back. Ha, I laugh at my own optimism!

I say hopefully, because, as I mentioned in past columns, our upcoming “advanced” TV system is not without its problems, ignoring the fact that, at least in the short term, the audio and video quality will be worse than what we have now; ignoring another fact that if you live in an urban canyon as I do, then you may have to buy cable, because there’s a good chance that over-the-air reception won’t work.

Right about this moment, you’re thinking, “Hey schmuck, this is an audio magazine!” What DTV and this month’s continuing saga have in common is the “i” word: interoperability, or lack thereof. Technology, pulled in diverse directions by special interests, makes for a chimera that can’t get up and walk out the door of your local consumer electronics retailer. Sorry to mix my metaphors, but, as I remind you all the time, it’s the consumer, stupid! Or rather, it’s the CE manufacturers and content holders that drive our audio industry. Like audio, as goes CE, so goes FireWire.

Too Many Cooks?
Who’s havi?

 HAVi is the Home Audio Video Interoperability collective. They’re your basic monster CE vendors trying to reach consensus: Grundig, Matsushita, Philips, Sharp, Sony and Thomson, along with Hitachi and Toshiba providing chip-level support. HAVi states, “most HAVi-compliant devices will come with their own dynamic Device Control Modules. Updating functionality can be done by downloading/uploading new capabilities via the Internet” through any device on the bus with an Internet connection. Next year, progressive CE manufacturers like Samsung will have 1394-enabled DTV tuners, integrated HDTV sets and other set top-boxes designed for use with displays.
There are several camps working on “standards” for 1394 protocols. Several is, in my opinion, too many. For one, there’s HAVi, an industry consortium trying to steer 1394 applications in the CE space (see sidebar for more information). For another, there’s Yamaha proposing its mLAN protocol as the specification for “Audio and Music Data Transmission” to the 1394 Trade Association’s AV Working Group. Strange that Sony, an early adopter of FireWire, hasn’t used it yet on any audio gear…

The David among all these Goliaths is Digital Harmony (www. digitalharmony.com), a provider of tools, chip designs, software and product certification services. DH has come up with a bunch of stuff to address many of the issues facing a company wanting to mesh FireWire and audio. With a growing number of licensees, including Harman/Kardon, Lexicon, Madrigal Audio Labs, JBL, Infinity, Meridian Audio Group, Denon, Onkyo, Boston Acoustics, Panja and Sensory Science Corporation, as well as semiconductor partners Cirrus Logic, Crystal Semiconductors and ARM, Digital Harmony has a good deal of industry support. Right after the 1394 DevCon, I talked to the head honcho, Bob Moses, about his company. Their dream of all data formats—multichannel and Red Book audio, MIDI, raw data files, even video—being transferred over the 1394 bus without burdening the user with complicated format transcoding and synchronization decisions may come to pass.

Moses is excited about the prospects of using FireWire in studios but also foresees potential problems. “1394’s job really ends after you’ve moved a giant block of data from one device to another,” he says. “It defines the basic data transport services in a system, but… not which audio and video formats or optional bus management services should be supported or how the equipment is controlled. This is left to developers to define, according to the intended application and require- ments of their products.” There, my friend, is the rub. With such a wide-ranging standard, capable of handling isochronous data like audio, video and MIDI that requires guaranteed latency, as well as asynchronous data like IP, SCSI and other computer babel, there’s bound to be some confusion and duplication when vendors get around to implementing this stuff at the application level.



Reprinted with permission from Magazine, November, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved.