Impressive. There's the potential here to found an industry.
I would have suggested working on the interface spec between the
boxes first, and that seems to be well under way.
Stock 100BaseT and 1000BaseT should be OK for home use and other
situations where the cables aren't disturbed often, but I question whether
the connectors (and maybe even the cable) would hold up in studio and field
recording. There should be an upgrade path to a more rugged alternative for
those situations. I think the avionics industry might be working on a MIL
spec Ethernet connector for military aircraft and shipboard use; it wouldn't
look anything like an RJ-45, of course.
I'd question pure PNP. Seeing all the channels on the mixing board
suddenly get reassigned because somebody moved a connector could be a major
aggravation. That kind of thing is maybe OK in a home environment where
things don't get moved much, but the recording engineer needs a way to nail
down a particular A/D box to a particular bank of knobs on the board. How
about an address switch with a default "Auto" position? A higher-end
console might need a way to assign a knob to any box and input, without
regard to the assignments of neighboring knobs; that type of board might
have LCD labels above the knobs to show automatically where the audio is
coming from.
The technology surrounding the digital audio bus cable standard
could lead to generations of product evolution. For example, a host
computer quiet enough for the studio control room or the concert hall
probably couldn't be fan-cooled; this means major changes in packaging, and
might do away with the motherboard/daughterboard concept entirely. We might
end up with a purpose-built processor that has a KVM interface, multiple
SATA or i-SCSI ports, multiple digital audio bus channels, and nothing else
a PC tech would recognize as a computer. Processor cooling could be done by
natural convection with cooling fins covering most of the back panel,
possibly mediated by heat pipes.
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