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Chace Digital Stereo®
(CDS)
CDS is a patented (#4,792,974)
process which transforms mono sound tracks into stereo, 5.1 and even 7.1
delivery formats for full surround-sound spatialization. Issued in 1987
to founder Rick Chace, CDS has grown and evolved over the years and has
made Chace Productions one of the most highly regarded and sought after
surround sound production houses in the business.
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Advanced CDS
PCI Card
The Chace CDS™ PCI card was
designed from the ground up with an eye towards achieving a flexible, yet
scalable, architecture from both a hardware and software point of view.
The hardware itself is a combination of host ColdFire embedded controller,
up to 10 Motorola DSP56303 DSP chips, and a proprietary FPGA based router
and summer which manages a multiplicity of 32-bit summing busses known
as the XiRing (pronounced Zi-Ring).
The PCI card itself has two
XiRing nodes, the host ColdFire, all digital input/output, timing reference,
and a PCI interface. A XiRing node includes a 100mhz DSP56303 with up to
384k of SRAM. In addition, the PCI card can accomodate 2 plug-in daughter
cards, each with two to four additional XiRing nodes. |
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Custom I/O Interface
The PCI card connects to the
outside world via a custom I/O interface box that can be connected to Analog/Digital
conversion units such as the Apogee AD8000, Lucid ADA1000, or any number
of others. In addition, the interface unit connects to MIDI control surfaces,
such as the JL Cooper FaderMaster, for intuitive, user friendly operation.
Each interface box accomodates up to 8 channels of digital input and output,
as well as 4 MIDI control ports.
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DSP Real Time
Kernel
The XiChron DSP operating system
is a true multi-tasking, multi-channel, real-time kernel (RTK) which supports
multiple mixer configurations. This executive for the DSP56303's runs the
CDS processing algorithms and provides efficient automation of multichannel
audio.
The Motorola Coldfire embedded
microcontroller provides sample accurate VITC synchronization and automation
timebase for the CDS system. The Coldfire also supervises a custom FPGA
based DMA subsystem that is in charge of distributing audio parameter and
control data to all the DSP's. This architecture offloads most realtime
tasks from the WinNT Pentium host and allows the PC to perform the GUI
tasks that it is best suited for.
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Windows NT Graphical
User Interface
The CDS™ WinNT application
is a COM based graphical user interface. Component Object Modeling (COM)
is a software technique that allows changes and enhancements to the user
interface without having to rework any of the underlying system structure.
This facilitiates and encourages custom user interfaces targeted to specific
market segments to be developed without the need to re-design the whole
system.
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