Something I’ve been thinking about recently: why is it that this industry is so slow to adopt new technology?
For example, usb-c has existed for 7 years now, and it’s not until this year that we start to see some devices using it, like the new Roland hardware. If more devices adopted it, the current discussions about which battery packs might work with what hardware would instantly go away.
Another example is wifi and/or Bluetooth chips. They cost almost nothing today, yet it’s considered a luxury to be able to sync over wifi.
A third example is midi. Why is this ubiquitous standard not progressing so you could use it wireless?
-Compatibility with legacy gear
-Some tech that works OK with most consumer products isn’t good enough for audio gear aimed at pro level. Eg. MIDI over Bluetooth has too much latency for players; not something you’ll notice streaming music from your phone to a boom box, but a dealbreaker for a keyboard player.
Right, but how hard is it to come up with a wireless standard that removes it? Like those USB dongles for Logitech mice that don’t use Bluetooth. Shouldn’t be that hard.
And: most musicians want their instrument to work :without: being connected to any network, and also imagine that they’ll keep it for many years, so networking stuff has to be discreet and use standards that are as universal as possible.
All replies are about wireless midi. Let’s take that out of the equation for a moment: why is it that usb-c takes ages to get implemented even in pretty expensive hardware? Who prefers micro USB today?
IMHO, everything will be USB-C soon because it’s better, and backwards compatibility is easy and cheap. Bluetooth is a different story, it’s just inadequate for many scenarios. Wifi reliability and range is still a problem.
I think you’re right. Still, it boggles my mind that a video game controller from 2017 for $50 has usb-c, but a synth from 2019 that cost $400 uses micro usb. Some thing’s weird about the music industry.
because we dont want some script kiddie hacking our synths
i mean, there’s another kind of progress beyond making the whole world and its dog into an IoT wifi beacon
I doubt it. Apple has just set USB-C ubiquity back by about 10 years by adding USB-A back to its laptops. They were the only company driving widespread adoption and they just caved in to their customer’s and the standard’s) inertia.
Also, USB-C is a terrible standard. Because it’s not standard enough to be dependable. Sure, a lod of modern gear works, but finding the right cables, understanding which connections and features do what is a significant challenge. Thunderbolt is much better but the cost of maintaining the stricter tolerances of the standard seems to put costs up so high that the market for its use is much smaller.
I like the promise, but the implementation and practical reality is still grossly underwhelming.
I used to think so too. Then I started working as an integration tester for musical devices. And asking questions like, ‘why does this only have RCA outputs?’ and ‘why do they use such crappy-feeling knobs?’ 50c savings per unit is considered a big win on a device retailing for hundreds of dollars.
USB micro is awful, USB mini was ok though, much more robust and not much bigger than micro, it was much easier to insert correctly, but yeah USB C should be on everything now.
As for wifi and bluetooth not that fussed either way.
Because it’s the standard people hold it to. Not that they’ve got much choice, if the entire music industry wants to use old ass hardware and call it cutting edge there’s nothing we can really do about it unless everyone stops buying it. As people have said before economy of scale factors into it but still we could definitely be using spaceships compared to what is considered leading hardware right now. I think the other thing is that more complicated and powerful doesn’t necessarily mean better. My iPhone 12 is insanely more powerful than my iPhone 5 was but I use it for practically the same purposes. Making music is making music.
I am typing this reply on the newest Apple laptop available and you may rest assured, there is positively no USB-A port on it. What they did add back was a separate proprietary charging port (MagSafe), a SD Card reader (Yay!!!) and an HDMI port (for video editors I suspect). No USB-A ports. As far as I know, Apple doesn’t have a single product with USB-A on it and hasn’t for many, many years. All of its Macs have USB-C/Thunderbolt, it’s iPads have either lightning or USB-C. It’s phones all have lightning.
The general-purpose personal computer/tablet/smartphone industry is about 10,000 times the size of the hardware music instrument industry. Even the larger music industry companies like Roland and Yamaha are 1,000 times smaller than their PC/tablet/phone counterparts.
Standards like USB-C are developed and implemented by companies with huge R&D and capital expenditure budgets. It takes a long time for the physical costs and development time for such technologies to be reduced to the scale where companies with only a handful of developers can afford to adopt them.
You prompted me to check. I see you’re right. I must have remembered the announcement wrongly. My apologies. I shall reconfigure my expectations for USB-C ubiquity to 5-7 years rather than 10. USB-C is still anti-user, due to poor design and over-wide tolerances, IMO.