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h | h | I'm having Analog Separation Anxiety and FireWire is not quite the cure all. By Cris Dunnam, Editor With IEEE 1394 is about to explode in a big way, what are the chances of a device (and drivers, of course) that adapt various "antique" control & sync protocol to FireWire bus? I'm talking about old 2 and 8-track, 1/4" tape machines from Fostex, TASCAM, et al. Many home based project studios would love to resurrect their investment in analog after suffering the reality check of midrange bandwidth loss in software based recording. In other words, could there be a product that plugs a pair of 1/4" machines into an iMac DV for analog and digital audio recording? All the while, I’m looking at my crusty old Fostex analog 8 track setup and thinking - “Geeze, drums and acoustic guitars sounded so much better on tape . . .” For all of it’s expedient benefits, DAW, CPU-based and other forms of digital recording still have a midrange compression/bandwidth issues. Besides, the trend seems to be the more digital we get, the more we want it to sound analog. Paul Key of Synchronous Systems , Hopkins, MN says this: “ . . . I, like the writers I read at MacRocks, think it's [FireWire] an incredibly exciting technology.” Key warns, “However...there is a definite limit to how far back it will be able to reach. There's a lot more to being able to control an analog machine, particularly to integrating it with digital recorders, consoles and DAW's, than relaying transport commands to it. To be truly useful, a FireWire interface would have to either be able to control the speed of the machine or derive accurate speed information from it.” In the case of this study of future FireWire implementation, we are talking about a synchronizer. Key also tells us “While such a device is certainly technically possible, I can't see a tremendously large market for it. Of course the need for a market of a certain size is defined purely by the development costs, and I've certainly built devices with very few (sometimes one) customers, but the costs involved in becoming a FireWire developer make it seem that a device of that type would be prohibitively expensive.” While I may be proven wrong by some guy puttering in his garage who comes up with a box that does it, or by a large company that sees a need for an enabling device to adapt there own legacy technology, I think that the scarcity of devices that adapt older camcorders to FireWire (hooking my Hi-8 to my G3) helps bear me out. These devices exist but are a rarity. I expect that that market is much larger, and most video manufacturers are already doing FireWire development so there should be a lower barrier to development. Key's final summation of our little scenario is " . . . don't look back.” But what about the tape gear? Any guys our gals puttering around their garage out there? Just proves I’m not always right when predicting the future -- I said ADAT would never catch on.
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