The audio world is screaming down the digital highway with no end in sight.

Manufactures have introduced DSP (digital signal processing) products in record numbers, and why not?

After all, digital does make everything better?

You don’t have to search hard to find DSP in all kinds of audio equipment, including amplifiers, powered speakers, effects units, system processors and even microphones.

If you wanted to you could have a system loaded with DSP…just buy a microphone with built-in DSP, connect it up to your console with built-in DSP, send it over to the DSP (system processor), output the signal to the power amps, which ship with DSP, and on to the speakers, which if they are powered might just have some DSP just for kicks.

However, is there any point in that? Where should you have DSP in your system and how should you use it? That question may prove to be much simpler than the answer.

To start things off we should clarify that when I talk about DSP I am talking about a digital processor built into a device. A device that has DSP built into it may or may not have a digital output, and the digital output might be a different protocol from other devices in the signal chain.

In my previous (and extreme) example, you have a microphone with built in DSP. The microphone capsule converts the analog signal to digital, goes through the DSP and then a Digital to Analog (D/A) Converter to give you analog mic level output.

That analog signal then enters the mixing board and hits an Analog to Digital (A/D) converter, it then goes through the DSP and then another D/A converter. On to the DSP processor where once again we go A/D and D/A finally into the amplifiers and, yes you guessed it, once again the signal goes A/D and then D/A. Yikes!

An issue of major concern becomes the quality of the D/A and A/D converters. Just ask any studio guy how important the mic preamp is and more importantly the A/D converter the preamp uses! I recently had lunch with a friend who made the comment that at ever conversion you have the potential to as some “suck” to your sound quality.

Imagine the scenario above, we are talking suck x 8! I personally have never seen anyone with a set up like the suck x 8 above. Dave Mcnell has written a good overview of digital transports that will help explain the “suck” factor.

I have seen very real issues of choosing what digital transport to use to connect all of the devices together (assuming that the device has a digital output). With so many different digital transports to use it can become a bit daunting in trying to select which one to use.

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