Not sure about that. I know for sure that in Traktor HID is possible for Pioneer decks. Dont know about Serato.
But timecode renders your hotcues useless (or in better words, inferior), because the first transient is lost when the playhead jumps, due to constraints in timecode format*. On vinyl, where you cant jump the playhead seamlessly, this is no problem, but on digital players like CDJs, with loop, hotcue, etc, HID is superior. If Serato wouldn’t do HID on Pioneer, that would be a major downside to using Serato and Pioneer together…
Timecode has its position information superimposed on the carier signal: the carier signal which controls speed and direction is decoded near instantly (well, you still have to detect frequency, which introduces a phase shift, just like a crossover or EQ does…), but the position info takes a couple of periods, because every period of the 1kHz or 2kHz wave can only contain 1 bit. So if your position info would contain 24 bits, it takes 24 periods, for a 1k sinewave that is 24ms. If your playhead on the timecode CD jumps, it takes thus 24 milliseconds to move the playhead in serato. It is constructed so this doesnt shift the time, and your beatmatching stays spot on, but as a result, the first 24milliseconds of the cued beat drop away, which is the attack of it… in human language, when you cue your hotcue to a beat which goes “tack”, youll hear “ack”
Yeah, Phase is cool and all, but you have to keep those things charged, and the batteries in them will inevitability fail. Pioneer’s solution of having that functionality built-in, and using the magnet is pretty remarkable.
I’m not even in the market for this, but I still think it’s super cool. I gave up on DVS years ago. I use my turntables to play cut wax.
Yeah, this comment nails Pioneer’s whole strategy.
Just looked this up, and MIDI can send about 1000 commands per second. So 1ms latency per command. HID is about twice as fast: not knowing anything about a HID commands length this could potentially halve the latency. A timecode position block has a latency of 20ms to bring you within 1ms of the desired position (for Serato). For cue/play, loop, hotcues, MIDI and HID are clearly the winner?
Also, the carrier signal will take a little while to be decoded in a fast fourier transformation, it’s the digital equivalent of the phase shift an RC or RL network introduces. A FFT window needs to be 5 times the lowest detectable frequency length. At cruise speed you would have a delay of around 5 milliseconds before the computer can recognize that speed, but at lower speeds (a slow scratch, where resolution would matter the most), this delay goes op substantially, where a scratch at 1/10th of the speed would take 50ms to recognize. Ok, maybe you can go faster when you count zero crossings of a pure sine wave, but then you are left with 0,5ms at cruise and 5ms at 1/10th delay. A MIDI jog dial wil keep at it’s 1ms, no matter what. So let’s say for pure scratching, it’s a tie…
So I don’t completely follow you?
(the reason of the delay of a FFT, FIR filter, RC or RL network is simple: when measured, a wave is a series of values, be it digital or analog. If I give you the first input value, say 1 volt, you can not possibly have a clue about what frequenty is to come, neither does a computer: for all we know, we could be looking at 1V DC. But when could also be looking at the start of a 100V 10Hz sine wave. Or the peak of a 1V 10kHz triangle. OR a square wave, or… Only after a certain time (1/4th of a wavelength?) one can be certain of the input frequenty. Offcourse, the lower the frequenty, the longer this takes, because the wavelength is longer. And this incertainty is reflected in all known filtering and analysis methods, be it digital or analog, in the form of delays or phase shifts)
So far timecode works the best for dvs even though it comes at a price of platter latency. Although spinning platter devices are pretty much satisfactory, scratching with tc feels the closest to the real thing right now.
It’s a trade off for each.
With an HID platter using an encoder with 3600 points, you have lower latency at a lower resolution.
With timecode, you have just short of 4000 points with a Serato record, or over 7000 points with a Traktor record, with a higher amount of latency.
4000 points? a 1kHz sinewave had 1000 periods per second. In that second we have 0,75 turns at 45RPM, so 1000/0,75 = 1300 periods per rotation. Or 2600 zero crossings. For Traktor, running at 2kHz that is 5200 zero crossings. OK, at 33RPM I come up with 3600 and 7200 zero crossings.
But all in all, I think we (or I) are showing of. In reality you won’t notice much of this. The feeling of a 12" platter with the force of a direct drive motor vs the feeling of a 7" plastic wheel standing still makes a way bigger difference then all the mathematics above. I’m not a turntablist, but the latency of relative mode, nor that of a digital platter ever hindered me. Position jumping in absolute mode did however, thats why I never used timecode CDs. That’s why I choose CDJ-style digital platters. If I would be a turntablist, I would very much still use timecode, just for the feeling of it
I’m pretty sure software uses these signals in whichever form they come as telemetry readings that are used to control the track.
Controllers using motorized platters @3600/R can only give forward, backward, and speed. Timecode gives you forward, backward, speed and absolute position. I’m not going to go deeper into why this is important.
I was picturing the stereo image in my head instead of a mono signal and combining the two.
We mostly use DVS at 33RPM. But I did over-estimate still, you’re right. It would be 1818 points for 1kHz signal and 3636 points for a 2kHz signal on each channel.
Yes, but my point is that that absolute position comes with a terrible latency. 20ms for Serato. Possibly more for other software. And depending on what you do with it, for instance setting loops and fingerdrumming hotcues, that makes timecode CDs useless.
Oh yes, you do have left and right, 90° out of phase. So you could theoretically double the amount of zero crossings.
But on the other hand, you still have to be careful when your sample reads 0. Is it a zero crossing, or is it a glitch? Maybe you missed a zero crossing, because the exact zero went between two samples? Or maybe there is a big scratch which degrades your timecode signal… If you have to follow the entire sine wave to know if a zero crossing is about to happen for this, you are back to FFT, which is slower than just counting zero crossings of a known sine wave. I bet it is safe to say that the extra channel cancels out due the complexities of noise, dirt on a record, or “near zero” samples.
A digital platter has 3600 discrete points. Fair enough, probably dust and mechanical wear and tear are an issue here as well…
well, enough to be clearly heard: I could never overcome the fact that with timecode CDs, a hotcue on a beat sounded like “oom, oom, oom” instead of “boom, boom, boom”. As soon as MIDI and HID came in practical forms, I never looked back… But then again, I don’t scratch.
I haven’t disassembled a Rane twelve mk2, so I’m not sure which encoder is being used for his. Optical encoders are pretty reliable over long periods of use.
HID would be my preferred in an offering like the Pioneer turntable here, for the lower latency alone.
DVS systems already are built for noise filtering and using a noise source to know where the needle is at on the record in reference to the spindle. Hence the term Noisemap.
My assumption, which could easily be wrong, is that pioneer stuck with what Hanpin had available. And this is why they went with a noisemap tomecode instead of HID. Also, at this time, Rekordbox doesn’t have support for high resolution encoders.
