dLive Tech Questions

Forums Forums dLive Forums dLive General Discussions dLive Tech Questions

This topic contains 9 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by Profile photo of mautry mautry 8 years, 9 months ago.

Viewing 10 posts - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #48615
    Profile photo of millst
    millst
    Participant

    Hi Guys,

    Firstly well done on the dLive, it looks fantastic, can’t wait for pricing and a few questions to be answered before placing our orders.
    The surface and layout look brilliant. I have a few questions I’m hoping you can answer now the cat is out of the bag.

    – Bit Depth – all of the stuff online is saying its 96bit, but in the tech specs it says 96bit accumulator, obviously these are quite different things. I love huge internal bit depths as it means you have insane gain options (something a lot of other manufacturers struggle with). The 56bits on the iLive was huge, so 96 is going to be massive. My real question though is what is the sample bit depth? Is it 24bit, 32bit or 48bit on the sample (front end and outputs). This will give an indication of the noise floor which I’m hoping is massive. It says “Variable bit-depth” on the tech spec, does this mean you can choose and if so what are the options?

    – AES outputs – a lot of rental companies run AES inputs on all their amp racks, I see the surface has AES outputs which is great, but I don’t see any AES outputs on the rack, close to the stage where you need them for driving amp racks. This was a major flaw with the GLD as well and prevented us from buying any GLD’s, we just stuck with the iLives which had great AES output options on the rack. I see there are some expansion ports on the rack, will one of these be for AES?

    – 128 Inputs – is this only supported with expanders, or can you link two 64 channel dLive’s together and control them as one mixer from a single surface like the dual rack mode on iLives. This is important as it determines what frames people will buy, for example, if you can link two together, we might buy 2 x 32ch racks instead of 1 x 64.

    – “Over 814 system inputs and 824 outputs” – can you elaborate what this actually means in real world terms?

    – What is the “Active Pad Technology” and how does this work in practice, is there a pad button or just a gain knob with a really wide range? Autogain?

    – The dedicated ME-1 port, is this for uplink to an MEU or for just driving a single ME-1. Is it Powered?

    – On the surface – video output – is this VGA and does it support external touch screens?

    – Does it have the same – “power on” architecture as the iLive? in the event you lose power does it return exactly where you were when the power resumes or do you have to recall a scene?

    – What is the boot time of the rack? (from power on to passing audio).

    – What is the boot time of the surface including connection to the rack and ability to commence controlling the rack?

    Many thanks and really looking forward to some of these answers.

    Regards
    Toby

    #48616
    Profile photo of millst
    millst
    Participant

    ohhh, one more question, are there one or two SBC’s in the dual screen version?
    and if the surface has VGA ouput and supports another touch screen, does the second screen mirror the onboard screen or can you extend onto another external screen?

    #48624
    Profile photo of Nicola A&H
    Nicola A&H
    Keymaster

    Hi millst,

    Wow, I’ll do my best to answer it all 🙂

    – Bit Depth – 96bit refers to the accumulator only as you say. By creating our own FPGA implementation we are not limited to a single processing bid depth across the signal path. We can choose whatever bit depth we fancy for each operation or processing block, this gives the DSP engineers control over precision of the calculation and noise floor. So in a way all the arguments of floating points vs. fixed format are gone!

    – AES outputs – You can fit up to 4x 8ch AES out cards to each modular DX32 expander. An AES out option for the I/O Ports is also being considered.

    – 128 Inputs – dLive will not support ‘Dual Rack’ setups, so yes, 128 inputs is only via the DX expanders.

    – “Over 814 system inputs and 824 outputs” – that’s counting all possible patchable system inputs and outputs including MixRack, Surface, I/O Ports, expanders. It’s the number of max sources and destinations the system can deal with.

    – “Active Pad Technology” – there is a PAD switch. Active refers to an active design which varies the circuit impedance to work best with line level sources, thus achieving better linearity when compared to a passive PAD.

    – ME-1 port – this is a 40ch 48kHz output (plus ch names and stereo links) to either ME-1s or ME-U. It’s not PoE.

    – On the surface – video output – it is VGA although we are considering DVI as a rolling change in production later on. You can mirror either screen, possibly select a third view (TBC). It doesn’t support external touchscreens.

    – in the event you lose power does it return exactly where you were when the power resumes? Yes.

    – What is the boot time of the rack? TBC but I’m expecting a few seconds, similar to iLive.

    – What is the boot time of the surface including connection to the rack and ability to commence controlling the rack? Roughly 40s at present but we haven’t done any optimization of the boot up yet.

    – are there one or two SBC’s in the dual screen version? One supercharged SBC 🙂

    Hope this helps.

    #48631
    Profile photo of terrine
    terrine
    Participant

    Hello @nicola 🙂

    Quick & Dirty

    Why not DisplayPort? With DP you can choose by u self what you wanna use… VGA, DVI, HDMI, DP.

    Best regards

    #48642
    Profile photo of millst
    millst
    Participant

    thank you so much nicola, this does help, very useful and all the answers I wanted to hear.
    would be great to see the DX32 expanders and options soon.

    #48649
    Profile photo of Nicola A&H
    Nicola A&H
    Keymaster

    would be great to see the DX32 expanders and options soon

    We will upload photos soon. In the meantime this might help.

    Attachments:
    You must be logged in to view attached files.
    #48652
    Profile photo of richardcooper22
    richardcooper22
    Participant

    Nicola,

    Is there any improvement over the iLive scene management, especially for theatre type usage? Scene fades. How about does the MIDI control compare to iLive, and how about OSC?

    There’s mention of “IP Remotes”, are these going to be a networked replacement for the PL series controllers?

    Sorry if this is already covered somewhere.

    #48660
    Profile photo of Nicola A&H
    Nicola A&H
    Keymaster

    Hi Richard,

    Scene Management has been one of the areas of focus for dLive software development. dLive has a Cue List manager, scene crossfades, embedded recalls (automated scene recalls), selective multiple scene update, recall undo and more.

    The MIDI/TCP protocol is likely to be similar to iLive and GLD, at launch at least.

    Yes, IP is a new generation of PoE powered, TCP/IP networkable remote controllers.

    #48684
    Profile photo of Wolfgang
    Wolfgang
    Participant

    hello Nicola,

    is it now possible the dynamics-sidechains in the inputs come from all inputs & busses?
    and dLive has dynamics-sidechains also in the subgroups?

    and: can we route now the main-bus into an aux? (for example for InEar-send)

    #49109
    Profile photo of mautry
    mautry
    Participant

    Nicola A&H,
    Are there any other images at all of the surfaces, mixracks, or expanders? Looking for a little more info for familiarity and understanding.

    Thanks

Viewing 10 posts - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic.