Issue #27 - May 1999
New Products - Product Improvements
The Goldmund Chiasma AC3 Software is coming, but the DSP card is late.
We know you are all waiting for our new Chiasma, and so are we.
The two serious innovations the machine will provide are a new revolutionary DSP modular PC card design, and a AC3 software that will push this usually-quite-mistreated format to new quality levels never expected before.
Let us give you few more information.
The DSP card we will use in the Chiasma is a PCI sound card of a totally new design, developed by our AIHC group for the professional Audio market. Allowing a modular approach to any formats and number of input/outputs, the card will be usable for any type of digital processing (AC3 encoding and decoding, sound equalization, time modification, etc…) in any type of applications (Studio PC recording, Home Theater systems, Speaker crossovers, room acoustics software, etc…).
This beauty has the capability to be used in the digital or analogue domain, with one or more DSPs, and in any combination of inputs and outputs numbers you may dream of.
So what is the problem ? It is not ready yet…
On another hand, the sound quality of the unit will even more depend on the AC3 decoding software that our team of engineers wrote for it. Being a 32 bits floating point AC3 decoder, it is already one of the most performing. But we further improved the final result by implementing what the software engineers call a “plug-in” which pushes the performances of the whole a few steps further. Just for your information, the Chiasma will pull out of the AC3 signal the traditional 5.1 channels but in 96kHz 24bits, an absolute world premiere. With much lower noise and distortion, with improved transient accuracy, this software should bring the surround digital signal up to the Goldmund level.
What about the DTS, would you ask ?
Who knows ? Who cares ? The format has been far from giving the performance audiophiles initially expected and the scarcity of decent software is an indication that the abdication may be closer than expected. So we may decide to implement it or not, depending on the demand. But our aficionados won’t use it, so ?
Now, folks, we all waiting for the Chiasma to finally exist. We have seen the presentation screen of the software, heard the few early babbles of the AC3 software and we are all only waiting now for the sound card to be ready. Soudblasters beware !
The 96kHz is late, the 192kHz is behind (far) and the DSD is not worth the change. What a mess !
You know for long that we are quite careful when new technology formats are announced and it is the case, more than ever, for the bunch of new Audio formats which have been announced during the past few years.
Knowing well that anything above 20 bits 48kHz is still today pretty vaporware, we watched the successive announcement of DSD, DVD Audio and finally even 192kHz with a quite large smile. Listening to the first units bearing these formats (no names please…) has confirmed that there was a new wave of “commercial bits” and “commercial kHz” raving around but that real quality lovers must avoid them at any cost…
We said before that the 96kHz 24 bits would probably become soon reasonable enough (translate : better than the 48kHz 24 bits in sound quality) so we started last year our developments in that direction and should be ready by coming fall to make our point there. But the other 2 formats are another story. DSD proved quite poor and will probably never float for high-end, and the 192kHz is not yet to the point of being usable despite existence of decent chip designs. More, the only real advantage is a better phase response around 20kHz which helps designer who do not know how to deal with that (critical) problem. Knowing that we have already a negligible phase error in our 48kHz units (100ps time error), we did not need that advantage. And the software ? So, be patient. But we confirm the 192kHz as the way to go… in the future.
Marketing News
No more faxes, please !
The point is not to tell you our fax machine is broken, but to strongly encourage you to use e-mail to correspond with us. You may reach us at any time, you will get a faster answer, even if the person who answers is not in the office. Much more efficient. For our dealers and distributors, this will become now the only way we will accept orders and requests, simply because it is more reliable. So guys, all to your keyboard. As you know we all answer at goldmund@goldmund.com.
