...............
gold star to sugeek for stepping up on this.
as a huge fan of old school effects and i'm intrigued by what i've heard and seen of
digisynth. i'd like to see more footage on youtube and i'd love to see it at a couple lem's.
i had the pleasure of experiencing laserium when i was young and it got in my blood and stuck there. seeing dslijon perform on a console at socalem brought it all back. knob boxes and wiggly lines. galaxies. there's something about that light that transports me. it's like mainlining sci-fi and unicorns. beautiful.
even if the abstracts aren't your thing, it's *always* good to have new smart people bringing interesting things to the laser party. this is how we all learn and invent and raise the bar. we're a community of smart and passionate people. i admire that. keep creating. keep that magic. keep the light.
yes, this technology isn't cheap, but i think we're all a little spoiled by what is mass produced in china. have you priced laser gear outside of the PL community?
if you can do it cheaper and better, do so. make us all a little smarter and better. bring competition to the table. we all gain from it. just remember time isn't free. everyone has to eat.
you guys are doing good work and i like where this is going. i'd like to see it coupled with lumia. i can help with that.
suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
...and, thus, we come-back to validating of the whole point of this thread...(what was its' Title, again?) ... So, Thank You, Sir Lava, for your excellent, candid, and un-biased review of this awesome 'Ferrari' of a program...
AaaaaayMen!
...first post of yours in this thread I think most of us can heartily-agree with...
...and guess who just-found an entire *tub* of glorious never-before-seen lumia-wheels / fx buried in a back-room at Laserium [ insert maniacal laugh-trak, here...] Muuuuhuuaahhha-ahh-ahh-haaaahhh!
paz y luz...
j
....and armed only with his trusty 21 Zorgawatt KTiOPO4...
[QUOTE=dsli_jon;190832]
...and guess who just-found an entire *tub* of glorious never-before-seen lumia-wheels / fx buried in a back-room at Laserium [ insert maniacal laugh-trak, here...] Muuuuhuuaahhha-ahh-ahh-haaaahhh!
what time should i come over?
suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
I can go up to Cleveland, or Dr Lava can go see Matt, and we have other options with ADAT or Lightpipe to hard drive without going though a step that limits it to 64 colors with no gradients or does other programmer inspired "Funky Fresh" modifications and post it to the FTP with fidelity.
Steve
Getting the output to high quality is no problem. I think the wave file snips for sound card DACs are a fantastic idea, and they can be converted to ilda 5 for those without. ILD SOS is able to play ILDA files as a pure point sequence, so no fidelity is lost. So it would be awesome if you felt like posting some art.
As far as the delta-sigma DAC conversion comparison, this would be an interesting test. The result probably has a lot to do with what (if any) pre-filtering is on the galvo set. If a galvo set has a low-pass filter on its input, I doubt a sample and hold DAC will generate any more heat in the galvos than a delta-sigma DAC. If, however, the galvos don't filter the input and use it directly, then yes there's a good possibility of more heat generated via the HF from sharp steps of the DAC. It would be very simple to test, I or anyone could do it with access to their DAC. The common sound card DAC has delta-sigma conversion but uses a sample-and-hold on the output so it has sharp transitions at 48kHz:
and so it would make a perfect comparison, because an identical waveform (in terms of sample rate and content) could be produced from both units and the power draw compared.
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I am quite dissappointed at the hostile attitudes displayed in this thread. For the record, I've been negotiating with Chuck for over a month now about him attending SELEM. Imagine how he feels when members of the community that will be attending the event are attacking his product WITHOUT EVER HAVING EVEN SEEN IT. Yeah, that's sure to make him want to attend...
Jesus Christ people - this guy won 6 awards at the ILDA conference last year. All with Digisynth. Do you really think he could pull that off by just buying some off-the-shelf crap and slapping a high price tag on it? Seriously? If you're all so smart, then why did Chuck and Matt have to spend over 3 years developing this thing? Why hasn't someone else put the pieces together from off-the-shelf technology already? Oh, that's right, because this is more than just a sound card and some audio-synth software! (Much, much more!)
How many of you know who Chuck really is? How many of you realize that he was a producer for AVI for years? Do any of you even understand the vast difference between the shows that AVI produces and literally everything else you can find on the PL FTP server? (Hint: unless you're hand-animating every frame in your graphics shows, in the same way that Disney animators used to do, your shows are *NOT* the same quality as the ones that AVI makes.)
What makes you think that someone with a strong background working for one of the premiere laser content companies would suddenly decide to ignore quality and produce a crappy product?
I posted about Digisynth back in September, after I returned from the ILDA cruise. I explained how cool I thought it was. Where was all of your skepticism back then? Oh, but now that DrLava is talking about it, you suddenly doubt that it could really be that good? Is your memory really that short?
Digisynth in it's current form is aimed at the people who want something that no other laser show software has. Is it expensive? Depends on what you compare it to. It's definitely expensive when compared to a sound card DAC. But it's *CHEAP* compared with Lasergraph DSP, and it's also cheaper than an LD-2000 pro system.
Many people think that Panoglin's LD-2000 system is expensive, but that hasn't stopped lots of PL members from buying one (or several, even). If you really like the idea of creating truly unique laser art, and especially if you have a fondness for abstracts, then Digisynth is hands-down the best thing going right now. (That's why it won so many awards in 2010.)
If you can't justify the price in terms of your own budget, that's fine. Truthfully, I can't afford Digisynth either. But don't confuse your inability to afford something with it's actual quality. If I could afford it, I'd buy Digisynth in a heartbeat, because I recognize how awesome it really is. (And evidently, so does Disneyworld, since they've been buying up the transcoder units like hotcakes for the last 3 years. That ought to tell you something about the quality...)
Chuck and Matt have even talked about the possibility of releasing an "intro" version without the transcoder, which would bring the price down to something between an FB3 and an LD-2000 intro. There was even some talk about demo units being available in time for SELEM. But believe me, the attitudes expressed in this thread certainly aren't going to convince them to move in this direction.
Right now they only have to support a relatively small group of professional laserists who all use the same hardware (the transcoder) and understand that quality costs extra. How much worse would their customer service issues be if they had to deal with hundreds of inexperienced hobbyists running vasly different hardware who think everything should be cheap (or free)?
Finally, I've got to address this quote (below), even though it's a tad off-topic:
I call bullshit on your so-called "research". If you had bothered to perform even a cursory search here on PhotonLexicon you would have found multiple threads talking about chinese galvos that have failed. For that matter, if you had attended SELEM, you would know that EVERY YEAR there has been a chinese galvo failure on at least one projector, if not multiple projectors. (In my case alone, I've had scanners fail in 2007 and in 2010.)
Then you haven't been reading PL very thoroughly.Honestly I cannot remember hearing/reading about even one set of Chinese galvos failing.
The reason people continue to use Chinese scanners is because many folks can't afford the more expensive options. Also, if you're not doing professional shows it's no big deal to have to wait a month for a replacement to show up in the mail. But even so, everyone who uses Chinese gear understands that they are trading reliability for that low price.
Adam