The Future Of Audio-DSP

Fairlight, the inventor of the Fairlight CMI and the one and only company that feverishly insists on pushing the envelope regarding the development and manufacturing of high-end digital mxing consoles that could easily win any set decoration award for Sci-Fi Movies has (drrrrrumroll) ...well, pushed the envelope again. But this time its not about the looks, the sexy knobs and pulsating buttons or slick sliding futuristic foxy faders. No! Its about the heart of (your PC) machine and about making your CPU jealous as a jellyfish envying the strength of aerogel.

The Fairlght CC-1 is a PCI-Card that fits into most modern Windows XP-based PCs and enables the performance-hungry sound-engineer-of-today to evoke an unhealthy feeling of world-domination-super-powers within the deepest soul of the audio tweaking heart. The Card introduces a new FPGA-powered Multimedia-Engine-On-A-Chip developed by Altera Corporation promising a quantum leap in performance that is capable of "immediately obsolete DSP". Howzthat you ask?

According to Fairlight the Crystal Core CC-1 "enables two hundred plus channels of audio recording, editing, mixing, I/O and plug-ins, with extremely low latency and full processing capability on every channel. Dynamic Resolution Optimization (DRO) feature supports concurrent floating and fixed-point manipulations." This sounds indeed sexy, but what does it mean concretely? Let's look at the features: Those include 8 fully parametric EQs, 3 Dynamic-Stages for Compressor, Enhancer and Limiters, 72 Bit Resolution on every channel, ASIO compatibilty and the ability to connect VST- and Rewire-Environments into your CC-1. This comes pretty close to what would resemble the funcionality and sound of a Fairlight dream console but without the actual control surface.

Anyone keen on mixing-down those supercool but somehow thinly sounding Reason tracks on a Fairlight CC-1? Pump the shit up. You'll need something around 5000.00 $ for a basic system which might just give you the ability to do large industry mix-downs at home. Needless to say that CC-1-equipped PCs are theoretically limitless cascadable and preserve their low latency behaviour. I don't have a necessity to mixdown 1000 audio channels at once but the word "Expandable" has never been more true.

The CC-1 might definetly "shake the digital media world to its core by delivering new standards and raw performance capabilities previously unattainable even with the most expensive DSP based solutions" as the Fairlight promotion department claims.. Whether or not it really "instantly enables powerful new business and production models that will open up new opportunities for everyone” will be proven by the future. At the end of the day every Hardware FPGA, CPU or DSP needs useful software and I am not yet ready to give away my two creamy and phatty Universal Audio UAD-1 DSP Cards and all the little Fairchilds 670s, LA-2As, Pultecs and Neves that live inside... But it seems Fairlight is very open to OEM-cooperations and stirring up all the aforementioned facts could lead to some incredibly scary new products for audio professionals. I am really anxious to know what happens next...

Oh, I almost forgot. Digidesign's fearful reaction on the CC-1 announcement can be traced here.

bob humid, from the technological warfront. over and out.