of Microprocessors

HAL : I really haven't kept up with the general purpose DSP chip device offerings
as much as I'd like. Not too long ago a garden variety DSP would cost upwards of
$100 and to take advantage of its high-speed internal ROM, one had to commit to
a mask and 1,000 chips using it. Now prices are comparable to ordinary
microprocessors and on-chip Flash ROM, and significant RAM makes even low
volume and single's usage practical.
The Motorola 56000 has always been a music industry favorite fixed-point
architecture for high quality audio processing and its cost-performance has
continued to be an industry leader. Its 24-bit data word length and 56-bit ALU is a
perfect match to the increasingly common 24-bit audio formats. If one is
comfortable programming fixed-point binary math, requires professional quality
sound, and has cost constraints to deal with, it can't be beat.
Texas Instruments' 32XXX line is probably the industry's broadest. At the lower
end of the line are low cost 16-bit fixed-point devices selling for just a few
dollars. These are an excellent choice for speech processing, MP3 reconstruction,
and other audio applications that need not be pro level. At the upper end are the
32-bit floating-point models that are capable of high quality and can be
programmed effectively in C - but at a cost in money and power consumption.
The Motorola Coldfire is actually a general-purpose embedded microprocessor
instead of a DSP chip. It is intended as a high performance upgrade for the
68000/20/40 architecture. Since it's almost completely compatible with that
architecture at the assembly language level, it's a good processor that's a breath of
fresh air in this era of "reduced instruction set" CPUs.
SONIK : Did you do much work with VAST?
HAL : I really haven't been involved in the development or programming of
VAST at all. I guess the closest I got was designing the logic of the data path
portion of the Hobbes chip, which executes the VAST algorithms for all of the
K2XXX instruments. I have been much more involved with the infrastructure of
the instruments - keyboard and player control scanners, power supplies, power
amplifiers (for the digital pianos) and CPU boards for some products.
SONIK : Were you surprised at how successful the SP-series stage pianos have
been?
HAL : Yes, quite a bit. The product idea actually originated in Korea by J.W.
Chae, where he is a teacher, market researcher, and soundware engineer.
Initially there was very little marketing interest in the US though because they felt
that it wouldn't sell. Nevertheless, the Korean management asked me to start
development and when it was completed, sharpened their pencils to where US
Marketing couldn't refuse. Actually the sales surge from the SP series came at a
very good time when the market for higher-end instruments was down