Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 435 MIDI and sound card in hand

It has to be said that the unique effects of Tang Huan's localization strategy are very powerful.When he used the banner of Japanese companies such as Epson or Taito to plunder, the rejection he encountered was often quite limited.

Take Genichi Kawakami as an example. In terms of qualifications, he can also be squeezed into the ranks of the golden generation of Japanese entrepreneurs, but in the face of Tang Huan's cold-blooded capital stick, he has to compromise.

Seeing that Tang Huan made no secret of his complacency, Genichi Kawakami could only let the winner show off his power, and with a smile on his face, he said against his will: "I hope I can borrow Mr. Tang's good words, Japan Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd. continues Carry forward, and Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. will get out of trouble."

Hiroshi Kawakami bravely interrupted and asked, "I remember that Mr. Tang once said that he could help Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. to find a market opportunity in China. I don't know if this promise is still valid."

Genichi Kawakami glanced at his son appreciatively, and said to himself that there was finally a meeting for the development of the society recently. He was also very concerned about this topic, but due to his status, he was embarrassed to ask about it.

"Of course I won't break my promise." Tang Huan smiled lightly, "Well, I will purchase 500 motorcycles from you first to test the market. But there is one thing, the accessories must keep up."

Tang Huancai didn't have the time to help Yamaha Engine Co., Ltd., which had a serious backlog of inventory, but just picked up grass and beat rabbits at the right time.

Zhou Zhong has already taken up a post in the local area, so Tang Huan naturally wants to assist him in making some political achievements.

At this stage, the security situation in the mainland is not optimistic.This batch of motorcycles can be regarded as a gift from the past. They can be used to strengthen the frontline patrol force and deter criminals. The parts that are not needed can also be used to assist places in need.

If Yamaha motorcycles are suitable for the use environment in China, then some form of introduction and cooperation in Hong Kong City or other cities in Eastern Van Province can be considered.Of course, this project still falls on Zhou Zhong's head.

The causal relationship is as simple as that, but Genichi Kawakami and his son didn't know that Tang Huan was careless. They only thought that the richest man in the United States had a good character and a good reputation.

In the face of the power of the strong, the weak who cannot resist can only find psychological comfort and enjoy it with their eyes closed.

Kawakami Genichi and his son have already thought about it, especially after the change of thinking, they noticed some situations that were ignored earlier.

After the Hattori family handed over control of Epson, relying on the remaining part of the equity income, it seems to have become a rich man sitting and counting money, and the relaxation is indescribable.

Mikhail Kogan's changes were even more exaggerated. After selling Taidong to Tang Huan, he transformed himself into one of the top executives in the opponent's camp, and led the Oakland Athletics to Japan several times. The baseball team under the consortium played a friendly match, which can be said to be very beautiful and earn a lot of face.

After learning about these precedents in detail, Genichi Kawakami pondered why when he first started looking for external forces to counter Tang Huan, he not only hit the wall repeatedly, but was also misunderstood by the other party. Why did he let go of such a good cooperation opportunity?

The reason why Kawakami Genichi, who is over seventy years old, came out of the mountain for the second time under pressure and regained power, in essence, is to pass on the foundation to his son Kawakami Hiroshi.

Among them, Yamaha Engine Co., Ltd. is the fruit of his brainchild for decades, and diversified industries such as resorts and sporting goods are also implemented under his name; Japan Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd., which has the longest history but a relatively simple structure, is not impossible. Let go.

If they can get enough benefits like the Hattori family and Mikhail Kogan through this capital cooperation, it will be a bad thing to a good thing.Even, Hiroshi Kawakami's rise to the top position can be smoother.

Genichi Kawakami who wanted to understand these joints, in the next process of assisting Tang Huan to rectify the Japanese Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd., treated him with hospitality and tried his best to narrow the relationship between the two parties.

After deliberately forgetting the previous unhappiness, the relationship between Kawakami Genichi and Tang Huan can finally be described as harmonious.

In this way, when it comes to bargaining, there is no need to tear your face.

After all, Japan Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd. is different from Epson and Taito.

Epson is relatively independent from Seiko of the Hattori family, Taito was completely sold off by the founder Mikhail Kogan, and Nippon Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd. has always owned the YAMAHA brand with Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd.

There are too many entanglements of interests in it, and we must care about it.

Kawakami Genichi, who is already old, can't spend all day around this young man like Tang Huan, his status and energy don't allow it, so he pushed his son Kawakami Hao to the front line, which can be regarded as helping him establish prestige .

After seeing how powerful Tang Huan was, Kawakami Hao knew that he wanted to curry favor with his former opponent without his father Gen Kawakami twitching his mouth, so that he almost became a follower these days.

On this day, Hiroshi Kawakami continued to follow Tang Huan, appreciating how the other party wiped out Japan Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd.

When he saw a lot of Yamaha's electronic musical instruments connected in series and controlled by a Fangyuan computer through the MIDI interface, and then obtained the results of mixing, special effects, etc., Kawakami suddenly realized something and blurted out: "If Japan If Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd. is still sticking to the traditional musical instrument manufacturing business, and has not penetrated into the field of electronic musical instruments and MIDI, surely it will not become the prey of Mr. Tang?"

"Of course. My computer controls electronic musical instruments through MIDI. I can't build everything from scratch." After Tang Huan answered, he hit the Enter key casually, and a Fangyuan computer started playing MIDI music.

At this stage, the application field of digital audio is mainly reflected in digital music. After all, only the general consumer group with the widest audience can bring sufficient profit driving force.

There are roughly two types of digital music that people can usually enjoy: chip music on personal computers and video game consoles-Chiptunes and laser discs-CD.

After video games became popular in the 1970s, game sound effects and music that can provide an auditory experience quickly became a very important part of the design.

However, with the development of electronic game consoles up to now, there is no mature condition to play back high-resolution PCM recordings, let alone use commercially authorized high-quality recordings.

Therefore, the realization of game music can only choose real-time synthesis, that is, to implant the basic sound synthesis engine into the hardware.

Chip music emerged from this and has become a very popular form of electronic music. Many musicians have made great achievements in this field.

Chip music includes several basic waveforms, such as square wave, sawtooth wave or triangle wave, as well as basic percussion instruments, which have a certain ability of artistic expression, so many familiar works have emerged.For example, the game music in "Super Mario" is very popular.

What's more, crackers of many game programs and application software will add their own transition music in the code to show off their superb technology.

Several industry-leading manufacturers, including EA, have used unique sound processing chips in their video game consoles, and even some personal computers have followed suit.

Of course, the shortcomings of chip music are also very obvious.Sound processing chips from different manufacturers will produce sounds with different effects.

The arcade hardware system of Taito's blockbuster game "Space Invaders" launched in 1978 used Texas Instruments' sound processing chip SN76477.

The sound processing chip developed by the digital audio technology team headed by Shen Wangfu can be described as outstanding in various series of Xiaobawang electronic game consoles and Fangyuan standard personal computers, attracting many third-party manufacturers to specialize in running Come to buy.

Even so, the congenital malnutrition of chip music still cannot be fully compensated.

For example, in chip music, drum sounds are difficult to obtain and can only be simulated by short-duration signals, pulses, or explosive noises.

In addition, the polyphony of chip music is very limited, which limits the creative space of musicians.

Chip music belongs to 8 Bit music, which means that each electronic signal of sound is represented by a combination of 8 binary numbers.

Compared with the latest laser disc, the sound quality is greatly inferior. The technical specifications of the CD are 16-bit, two-channel, and the sampling frequency has reached 44.1 KHz.

In the original time and space, the popularity of CDs proved that its technical indicators were excellent and reasonable.

Fangyuan personal computer can use CD-ROM/CD-R drive, through the combination of hardware and software, so that computer users can experience the high-quality digital music form of CD.

In addition to the differences in technical specifications, CD and Chipmusic are implemented quite differently.

Chip music uses a sound processing chip to synthesize music in real time, which is equivalent to live performance; while laser discs are digital signals that have been recorded in playback tracks.

The audio track on a laser disc is different from the various files normally processed by a computer. If an hour-long CD music is converted into a file on the computer without loss and compression, the size will exceed 1 MB.

At this stage, only 8-inch and above hard disk systems in the enterprise storage market can provide such a capacity. The hard disk capacity of Fangyuan personal computer is only 10 MB or 20 MB, and Fangyuan personal workstations are slightly more, but they will not More than 100MB.

Obviously, it is okay to process a certain audio track or clip in a CD on a computer, but it is impossible to integrate it into a video game in the form of a file for playback when the player plays the game.

The latest MIDI, which appears to have emerged as the times require, is not only technically more flexible and powerful than chip music, but also avoids the problem of storage capacity caused by the playback of laser discs.Not generally pleasing.

MIDI is a communication protocol and work command between various electronic musical instruments, as well as electronic musical instruments and personal computers, which allows these devices to work together across different gaps in manufacturers, hardware architectures, etc., to achieve a higher artistic level.

As far as the inside of a computer or electronic game console is concerned, the existence of MIDI is closer to a file containing a set of instructions to direct how the sound card works, and it is different from the corresponding CD track, which is a huge file that purely records sound and is measured in MB. , which are often only a few or a dozen KB in size, and the difference in units of measurement is 1000 times.

Computers have their own differences in the realization of sound functions. For example, IBM-PC integrates an electronic speaker. Although Fangyuan computer also supports this kind of small speaker, it emphasizes the use of special sound processing chips, and even sound cards. Independent external audio system to realize the sound function.

After several years of technical accumulation from applications such as electronic game consoles, the digital audio technology team specially formed by Tang Huan has launched hardware that supports MIDI technology, and it is worthy of the name of a sound card.

MIDI sound card is like a sound processing chip that supports chip music, performing live and synthesizing in real time, but the synthesizer is more advanced, divided into two ways: Wavetable Synthesis - wave table synthesis and Frequency Modulation Synthesis - frequency modulation synthesis is FM synthesis.

The technical principles of wavetable synthesis and FM synthesis are both mature, but the progress of product realization is quite different.

Wavetable synthesis is to sample the sound of musical instruments to form a wavetable file. When playing back, according to the information recorded in the MIDI file, an instruction is sent to the sound card to find out the corresponding sound information one by one from the wavetable. Synthesizing and processing by the processor or the CPU of the PC system.

This wavetable file is casually a few megabytes in size, and this requirement alone limits the development of wavetable synthesis on computers.

FM synthesis is the most effective electronic music synthesis technology. It was first proposed by John Chowning of Stanford University in the United States. In 1966, he became No.1 in using FM synthesis technology to produce music.

Stanford University applied for a patent for this, and Yamaha obtained the authorization as early as 1975 and began to develop Digital synthesizer-a digital synthesizer.

But Yamaha was not able to take the lead in business because of this. Three inventors in Australia launched the Fairlight CMI system in Sydney in 1979, and New England Digital Corp. in the United States-New England Digital Company subsequently launched the Synclavier II system.

Both of these products are very expensive, selling for upwards of $20000.So Yamaha took advantage of this opportunity and launched its own digital synthesizer, the Yamaha GS-1, priced at $16000.

E-mu Systems, which can be located in California, USA, quickly set a record for this price discount, and launched a similar product priced at only $7900 this year.

In the original time and space, the market competition of digital synthesizers was extremely fierce. Yamaha quickly responded and launched the follow-up product Yamaha DX1983 in 7. The market position of the device began to decline.

The set of hurtful tricks used by Yamaha has indeed won it a dominant position in the market for more than ten years.And Stanford University also earned 2000 million US dollars before the expiration of the FM synthesis patent, becoming the second gold-absorbing patent, which is many times more successful than the mouse.

The prosperity of the FM digital synthesizer market led to the advent of the first affordable sound card, the AdLib Card, in 1987, followed by the innovative Sound Blaster card, which slammed the Quartet.

Compared with wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis has a major feature of simple structure and low cost. The sound source generation circuit is controlled by software, and it can be multi-channel synthesized to simulate the sound of various instruments.

Otherwise, the first affordable sound card would not have adopted this technology.

After Tang Huan took over Japan Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd., a leader in the musical instrument manufacturing industry, he has mastered a complete set of links in the field of digital audio. It can be said that MIDI and sound cards are all in his hands, which is enough to control the development of sound cards in the next ten years. .

With this integration advantage, it will be a matter of course to attract more musicians to adopt digital audio technology, and finally transform it into demand for IT products.

Seeing that Hiroshi Kawakami still wanted to continue to explore, Tang Huan smiled and patted him on the shoulder, "Actually, you only need to understand a little bit. Japan Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd. is on my chessboard and will let the remaining shares in your hands generate more revenue."

(End of this chapter)