Jeff Vallier

Jeff Vallier led a team of engineers at Gibson Guitars in teh development of a digital guitar.
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"Guitar making is still very much a wood and glue business," admits Jeff Vallier, a senior audio hardware engineer at Gibson Labs, the technology group for the Gibson Guitar Corporations.
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Vallier dryly points out that musicians have this expectation that "what they play and what comes out of their amp will somehow sync up."Real-time audio simply can't tolerate sluggish data transport.

Gibson's MaGIC specification addresses both these problems.Short for "media-accelerated global information carrier," MaGIC allows ordinary 100-Mbit Ethernet cable to carry up to 32 channels of 32-bit bi-directional audio with sample rates up to 192 kHz."It doesn't drop any samples at all as far as we can tell," Vallier says."The sound is pristine."And it's faster than a speed metal guitarist.According to Vallier, this real-time system guarantees a point-to-point latency of just 250 microseconds across 100 meters.

It's worth noting that MaGIC is not some enhanced form of MIDI, the 20-year-old "musical instrument digital interface" standard.MIDI sends instrument control information, such as note duration and pitch, over a serial connection, but "doesn't send audio signals at all," Vallier emphasizes.
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Professional users can replace their "audio snakes," thick bundles of analog cables that cost hundreds of dollars, with "a $10 Ethernet cable that you can pick up at K-Mart," says Vallier.Consumers could get rid of the bird's nest of wires behind their home theaters.And with its low latency, this wiring system conquers long distances."You can run a cable over 2,000 meters with no loss of audio quality," Vallier says.All sorts of users could also take advantage of the systems plug-and-play nature.With the MaGIC network automatically recognizing each hardware device plugged into it, users could configure complex sound systems from a single personal computer-much in the way a network administrator lords over you LAN in the office.Vallier predicts that third-party software developers will come out with graphical software to simplify this task.

"Guitar making is still very much a wood and glue business," admits Jeff Vallier, a senior audio hardware engineer at Gibson Labs, the technology group for the Gibson Guitar Corporations.
...
Vallier dryly points out that musicians have this expectation that "what they play and what comes out of their amp will somehow sync up."Real-time audio simply can't tolerate sluggish data transport.

Gibson's MaGIC specification addresses both these problems.Short for "media-accelerated global information carrier," MaGIC allows ordinary 100-Mbit Ethernet cable to carry up to 32 channels of 32-bit bi-directional audio with sample rates up to 192 kHz."It doesn't drop any samples at all as far as we can tell," Vallier says."The sound is pristine."And it's faster than a speed metal guitarist.According to Vallier, this real-time system guarantees a point-to-point latency of just 250 microseconds across 100 meters.

It's worth noting that MaGIC is not some enhanced form of MIDI, the 20-year-old "musical instrument digital interface" standard.MIDI sends instrument control information, such as note duration and pitch, over a serial connection, but "doesn't send audio signals at all," Vallier emphasizes.Anyway, MaGIC's 64 channels can also transport control signals--including MIDI--just as easily as they can move audio, only faster.Vallier reports that MaGIC currently clocks in at about 300 times faster than a typical MIDI system.

MaGIC Tricks

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Professional users can replace their "audio snakes," thick bundles of analog cables that cost hundreds of dollars, with "a $10 Ethernet cable that you can pick up at K-Mart," says Vallier.Consumers could get rid of the bird's nest of wires behind their home theaters.And with its low latency, this wiring system conquers long distances."You can run a cable over 2,000 meters with no loss of audio quality," Vallier says.All sorts of users could also take advantage of the systems plug-and-play nature.With the MaGIC network automatically recognizing each hardware device plugged into it, users could configure complex sound systems from a single personal computer--much in the way a network administrator lords over you LAN in the office.Vallier predicts that third-party software developers will come out with graphical software to simplify this task.A rock band, for example, may one day be able to set up their sound from the stage simply by dragging and dropping icons.

Not surprisingly, the first to take advantage of the standard is an electric guitar.At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Gibson Labs showed off its first digital guitar, based on 3COM's chip.All the MaGIC electronics fit in a "break out" box that installs in a pocket in the back of the guitar.About the size of a paperback, the box takes up more room than many guitar players would like.

Jeff Vallier, a senior audio hardware engineer with Gibson Musical Instruments, has received Design News magazine's Engineering Quality Award thanks to a sponsorship by ITT Industries, Cannon.

Vallier was honored for his work applying technical expertise toward creating standards and hardware that can transport real-time audio over ordinary Ethernet cables.He was honored at the "Engineer of the Year" event held last week at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois.Cannon is making a contribution to a scholarship in Jeff's name to a student at Iowa State University.

This was filed by two guys in Sunnyvale, California by the names of Nathan Yeakel and Jeffrey Vallier, who, my assistant Google tells me, are respectively chief technology officer and senior firmware engineer at Gibson Guitar Corporation.

A film crew from Just Enough TV, a television website, focuses in on Gibson Labs' Jeff Vallier demonstrating the new Gibson digital guitar.

All of the Gibsons onstage were digital -- equipped with Gibson's new MaGIC technology, as Vallier demonstrated throughout the show.

Gibson Labs engineers Andreas Schmidt and Jeffrey Vallier, who were in town for the Intel Developers Forum (Feb. 18-21), set up a Gibson digital guitar in the Scorpions dressing room, just before their show at the HP Pavilion.