Datasheet

68
68 September 2012 | audiomedia.com
I
hope Lemmy isn’t on Facebook, or if he is, I hope
it’s really a spotty 18-year old Motorhead intern who
posts for the great man. I say this because years ago
I read a Lemmy quote in which he berated modern
rockbands for spending all their spare time on laptops,
turning their back on the more traditional rock and
roll pastimes of excess, wreckage, and mind expanding
substances. Those TVs aren’t going to throw themselves
out of the windows now, are they? It’s a shame in a way,
Lemm y and the Laptops is a great name for a band.
But just like everything else, Rock and Roll is
succumbing to the computer. Mixing desks, outboard,
and acoustic software, live is awash with computers and
naturally – as you have to drag your show from town to
town – the laptop is king. But the laptop has a weakness:
you can’t open it up and stuff in a PCIe sound card for
multi-channel recording. Sure, you can buy an external
box, but how are you going to get 48 channels out of your
mixing desk into a wimpy little analogue box? Even ADAT
isn’t going to be enough unless your desk has got six
channels of ADAT. No, Ethernet is a much better bet, but
what would be damned convenient would be something
to interface with the Motorhead of multi-channel digital
audio – MADI, or AES 10.
MADI has been around for over 20 years and is
supported by lots of console manufacturers in the
live market, incuding DiGiCo, which has provided its
UB MADI system for this review. This cigarette packet-
sized box takes MADI in and out on coax and turns it
into USB 2 goodness, pluggable into every computer in
the world and probably the TARDIS too. USB and MADI
joined together in happy harmony.
Two things strike you straight away: what has DiGiCo
done with the ‘S’ out of ‘USB’ in the name of the box?
And 2: surely that’s 3… USB3 that is? You can’t get enough
channels reliably down USB2, can you?
Well, inside the UB MADI is a cleverly programmed
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
THE REVIEWER
ALISTAIR McGHEE
began audio life in
Hi-Fi before joining
the BBC as an audio
engineer. After ten
years in radio and
TV, he moved to
production. When
BBC Choice started, he
pioneered personal
digital production
in television. Most
recently, Alistair was
Assistant Editor, BBC
Radio Wales and has
been helping the
UN with broadcast
operations in Juba.
“This cigarette packet-sized box takes MADI in and out on coax and turns it into USB  goodness,
pluggable into every computer in the world and probably the TARDIS too.”
Alistair McGhee
FPGA (field programmable gate array). This is the device
that enables 48 channels of 48kHz audio in and out of
your computer. Of course, a word of warning here –
if your machine or drive isn’t fast enough to shovel all
that data, it won’t work. Or, if you connect it to a USB bus
that is hoaching with keyboards and mice you will also
have problems. That, of course, is not DiGiCo’s fault –
it’s just a fact of computing life.
Making An Impression
The design and build of the box is really, really nice –
you feel you could stand a sumo wrestler on it without a
problem. On the back plate there are two coaxial sockets,
and on the front a type B USB plus a multi-colour LED.
And that’s all there is to it. It comes supplied in a nicely
presented box along with a 4 Gb USB stick with the
drivers on it. >
DiGiCo UB MADI
MADI-to-USB 2.0 Interface
Alistair McGhee
DiGiCo
UB MADI
Feature Set
t MADI to USB 2.0
t Fully hot-pluggable
t 48 I/O channels
Manufacturer
DiGiCo
www.digico.biz
Price Details
UK: £750.00 (exc.VAT)
Information