Broke and short of space. These two problems often go together. It amazes me how much gear people can cram into the tiniest rooms. Every item must justify the space it occupies.
Without falling in to analogue romanticism, there is something special about having the signal that leaves your system be the signal that draws the image on the screen.
Each dot of colour across each line is directly related to the voltage that the system is generating… no conversion, no interpretation, just the image as you intended.
Anything that goes through processing changes that signal.
It might not mean much if we’re capturing, rescanning, editing, manipulating or whatever before it’s shared with the outside world.
It could mean a lot if the upscaling or processing for the LCD screen alters the image, and you never see the “true” output of your system.
For pure romanticism, there’s an interview with Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto) where he touches on some of the decisions to to work with the sounds he does. He said he is drawn to 15KHz, since that high pitch sound reminds him of being a child with the home TV always on.
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But you could also counter that up scaling etc is part of the system!
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If you do visually reactive work with audio, then the lag that can occur with LCD’s can be problematic.
If I put my system through my TV downstairs, the display lag is problematic. I can counter this by putting the audio through the TV, as this delays it by the same amount as the image. In that case, my audio cues are delayed, so I can’t manually switch the eurorack audio in sync with rhythmical transients for a performance.
A CRT removes all of these compromises because the display is being drawn at exactly the same moment that the voltage is being produced.
Apart from the TV, are you using pro video gear for capture? Have you tried using a pro monitor? The processing delay may be in the TV, where such matters are less important than in the pro world. There are many others differences, so I would recommend only using pro gear in general. By “pro”, I mean gear intended for use in the broadcast TV world.
I can easily understand why some people dislike HDMI, esp for live work. I’ve also noticed some pro converters addressing some of these issues, like the HDMI handshaking delays.
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BTW, the most extreme audio lag I’ve seen on TV was during Live Aid in 1985. Audio and video came from London and Philadelphia mainly via satellites. This was probably one of the many things being done for the first time ever that day. The scale of the event was definitely unprecidented. Many mistakes were made - and corrected on air.
So of course there were technical problems like audio delays. E.g. For a few seconds during one of the sets I saw, audio and video were very obviously out of sync. I read later (in a pro studio magazine) this was due to the satellite links being re-routed. Other issues were more subtle but still notable, like Brian Ferry’s use of two microphones, one for radio and the other for TV.
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I’m not using pro gear. I’m using relatively inexpensive gear. A CRT for £40 looks great, takes away a lot of pain and frees funds for me to build a fun and creatively expressive system. I appreciate that they take physical space and that the prices have been increasing.
I’d be interested in recommendations for responsive, pro LCD screens that are relatively inexpensive. In some cases, pro refers to things like colour reproduction, rather than display speed.
My understanding is that a digital display needs to buffer (at least) one frame of information for encoding before it starts sending it down the HDMI. For some reason, many of them have many frames of delay. Gaming oriented monitors seem better for this.
Some digital modules, such as Structure and MP appear to process at the frame level and introduce latency. If you start stacking them in the way that you flow signals between analogue modules, then
realtime response is a pipe dream. How these modules progress is something that I have been watching with interest. I own Structure and tend to feed its output into analogue stages to try and make it appear snappier.
I’m not using pro gear for capture. I do capture the audio and video at the same time, though, so they are in sync with each other. They are captured through different outputs than my zero latency monitoring channel. If my work improves, or people start offering money for it then I will invest in a higher level of capture.
The latency issue is an end-to-end thing, so anything in the chain could contribute to it.
Latency from the A/D converter will at the sampling rate, which I think would be the pixel rate. So, no latency greater than that.
An LCD monitor may well upscale and add latency, of course. I mainly use a pro monitor that can display 2160, but I usually feed it SD. Another LCD monitor only displays SD PAL. That one has composite and SDI inputs, but I only briefly tested the composite input. Anyway, it doesn’t need to upscale. I can get lovely video feedback results with it. Before that I used a non-pro upscaler and a standard computer monitor. The results were poor equality. Curiously, that monitor and upscaler worked fine with CCTV cams - all the images were very sharp, no noise. PAL and NTSC. I only had difficulty when using an LZX video source.
So I’ve tried a number of solutions. A CRT was never a practical option for me, but I’m glad that works for you and others here.
Thanks.
Memory Palace is indeed a frame buffer. That’s how I rememeber Lars described it back in 2010!
Any TBC will introduce latency, too. So most video mixers will add latency. You might find a very old mixer that doesn’t. I saw one such mixer on ebay, a few years ago. It required all video inputs to be frame synched. No, I wasn’t even tempted to buy it!
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