MIDI is pretty low bandwidth compared with even USB-A. Most uses of digital audio don’t even see the edges of USB-C’s bandwidth. Why use such a grossly over-specified connector?
The main reason is production costs vs sale price. Not sure how interesting it is but I’ll try to give you a sense of it. @PeterHanes’ answer is very good.
Most music gear is expected to be very high quality but you’re planning to sell a few thousand units. Your production costs are much higher than someone making consumer electronics and planning to build, say, a million units. For the exact same part you might pay double (in some cases).
The big manufacturers also have their own manufacturing facilities and everyone else has to go through a contract manufacturer where the volume stuff plays into it again. If you’re building a million units then you get huge discounts mostly on components but also on assembly, setup, etc. If you’re making a synth that might sell a few thousand units then you’re competing for time on the assembly line against everyone doing much bigger runs. Guess who has priority? Making your design more complicated increases your production costs.
Then there’s reliability etc. If you’ve been using Type B connectors for however many years and you want to swap to Type C. Ok great. You have to buy a bunch of different Type Cs but you have to test them and find which ones will last the life of the synth. If you make a mistake then you’re users will be returning units with broken USB ports. You could spend a little longer - delay taking your unit to market - while you figure it out - or, just, keep using type B because it’s cheaper and you know that it’s reliable.
Things like wifi are even worse. You not only need to spend more on a hardware wifi stack (probably part of your MCU or you add another one) but you also need to confirm that’s it’s good (so many are not good). Testing how a wifi stack handles a congested network isn’t really core synth designer work. Now you need a firmware engineer to work on wifi features (instead of actual music features).
At the end of all that you’ve spent all this time and money on things that don’t really distinguish your product in the market: expensive components, longer development time, more complex assembly… but how many more Digitakts would elektron sell (at a higher price) for having Type C or wifi? Very few.
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Not sure I follow this logic. 8bitdo is a much smaller company than Roland and they sell much cheaper products, but they use usb-c. Does the industry matter? A USB module is still a USB module.
I dont think the electronic music harware industry is behind anything.
Things like USB power and Wi-Fi midi have no place on music gear in my opinion. I want solid, reliable repairable equipment.
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Because:
- It supports more power (no need for 19V/3.4A or 12V/2A wall warts supplied in the box)
- It’s universal (no need for different cords per region)
- It’s easy to power from powerbanks (instant portability for all synths, no need for special solutions)
- Everyone has a USB charger already, and they’re sold everywhere
- If a cable breaks, you can buy a new one anywhere, for a few bucks
- If can provide power and send midi+audio, all in one cable
- Things like Overbridge actually does benefit from high bandwidth (imagine sending all 8 Digitakt tracks in stereo).
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Well, the industry is clearly changing this year. Roland isn’t a small player and others will follow. Maybe only for portable devices though (which would make sense). I understand that people want more reliable solutions in big studios or on stage.
Not if the user doesnt have/use a computer. For people using mixers, and recording/playing live from that, USB power/audio is useless.
I get the portability angle, I get why some people would love USB power and audio down the same cable. But there are people out there who dont want that. And there are people out there that want to repair their stuff, rather than buy a new one for a few bucks… throw away society is bad
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Could you elaborate?
Not trying to be a dick here and I’m sure there’s remarks to be made about my remarks but it seems to me you’re basing a whole lot of assumptions on not so much information. Also had a hearty lol at “how hard is it to come up with a wireless standard…” I mean, come on.
Because it fails to deliver on its promise. It looks like you can get any data down it, and power any device that uses it for power, from any adaptor. It looks like this because the plugs and sockets are all the same, and the main USB3 logos are all pretty similar.
But when you get into a) actually using it and b) trying to interpret the associated revision and feature logos you discover that the interface implied by the “universal” plug just isn’t universal. Manufacturers lie about the features their cables support. Some devices don’t support power; some do; not all will be labelled in a way that’s easy to interpret. Some devices appear to pass data through but don’t. Some cables allow power, some only allow data. Some adaptors only work one way up, despite the plug being reversible. The range of features or abilities potentially available using a USB-C cable is going up (e.g. the new high power rating that even Apple can’t use yet), so even the cables you bought last year are “out of date” now. If you have a drawer full of USB-C cables, you can’t tell from looking at them what they’ll allow to work at either end.
That this is without the extra layer of incompatibility introduced by having Thunderbolt share the same port and plug design.
Imagine being a “non-technical” user, or trying to explain this to your dad, or 5 year old?
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I thought DT tracks were mono. I don’t have a DT. And anyway, USB 2 over USB-A/B can support >16 tracks of 96Khz/24bit.
I accept that if you wanted to plug multiple Overbridge devices into one host, this might become a bottleneck. I don’t know how this is dealt with at the moment. Supposedly those “good” hubs (like Overhub) let you get more devices (and thus more channels), but I can’t confirm it works.
I get how USB-C looks like it might be really helpful. I started to go all-in with USB-C myself recently, but I found it so hard to manage that I’m hoping something better comes along before my printer dies.
One of the classic texts of Engineering Management is The Mythical Man Month. Although published in the '70s, it is arguably more relevant today now that most engineering has been virtualized to the extent that it looks a lot like software engineering.
TL;DR: Complexity kills. One or two people can build a thing very quickly in their basement or garage. When you start to include complex subsystems, documentation, or both, then complexity, cost and schedules quickly blow up.
The easiest way to manage complexity is to just focus on the basics and innovate in one place: sound, in the case of synths. For hardware engineers that have recently been working with USB-C, then it may be a simple matter to drop it into their designs. But for the person who has been working purely in the analog domain for the last decade adding any kind of USB could sink the project.
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I often see complaints about usb due to interference and noise that it introduces , sure there are workarounds but most responses I see from people don’t imply they’ve bothered to look for a fix.
The deepmind 12 had Wi-Fi , so there are some companies trying to innovate ( behringer !)
The very expensive modal synth at a company I worked at had a web interface but my impression was the synth barely functioned for quite a while ( perhaps firmwares fixed it but I’m No longer there )
My final point … let’s be honest overbridge has taken many years and is still not ‘ plug it in and it works ‘ … user friendly , I mostly just use the standalone app and use that quite simply …
as was mentioned above sometimes keeping it simple is often better.
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cuz you still need to connect to older stuff?
USB3 and Bluetooth interfere with each other on my 5k iMac to the extent that I can only use an external USB3 SSD with a very short, shielded, high quality cable that terminates in USB-C. USB3 with the weird wide mini plug has never worked reliably for me on that machine.
Having to deal with signals in the GHz range means a $500 scope isn’t going to cut it. Adding USB3 into your project may require scopes and logic analyzers in the $10k plus range. Or you just wing it and hope that the data sheets you depend on are reasonably accurate.
(I know there are RF engineers here, so I’ll shut my software-engineering mouth, hopefully before I say something tremendously idiotic!)
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All this is way beyond me, I’m just thinking about powering boutiques and typhon, haven’t gone near scopes n that stuff
Ever notice that you can’t buy a USB-C hub? I mean one that has more than one in and one out, not counting power-only. It isn’t possible.
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I can plug USB A-> C cables into a USB3 hub and get roughly but not exactly the same effect. I’m a little surprised that no one is making frankenhubs around this topology.
Is an actual USB-C hub forbidden by the spec or electrically impossible?
I read a technical article on it at one point but I don’t recollect the details, and you can probably find such an article as quickly as I can. I think it’s just quite difficult given the constraints of the specification.
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How many game consoles do you think are sold compared to Korg Synthesizers?
I’d bet a week’s salary it isn’t even remotely close to the same number.
You’re talking about niche market stuff with narrow profit margins compared to XBoxes.
We had historically good music equipment from companies like Yamaha because they probably made enough money selling boat motors and motorcycles and shit that they could afford to make drums as a side hustle.
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