posted 29 July 2009 05:20            

I have a Paca and I am slowly making my way through the Kyma-X book. I am yet to fully grasp all the Kyma concepts but would love to make contact with any users who may be willing to give me some assistance over email (or perhaps in person if in Australia.)

I am far away from tackling Capy-Talk still, but I have had some experience in assembler programming from Z80 days so hopefully that'll be a good background when the time comes.

My main field of work is sound design for film and television, and I look forward to integrating Kyma into my workflow once I get to know it a bit better.

At the moment, however, I am having a lot of trouble with my interface - the Presonus Firebox, which seems to be the noisiest piece of audio gear I have ever had. It picks up all kinds of hum, hiss and RF interference no matter what my Kyma/Computer/Firewire configuration is. Perhaps it was the interface to avoid. Upon searching the internet, I saw that others have the same problem, so I am confident that mine is not an isolated case. What are other people using and happy with?

All the best to everyone and SSC.

posted 29 July 2009 21:01            

Unfortunately the lines are unbalanced since I am monitoring through an unbalanced device. I know this is not ideal, but I never thought I'd run into this much trouble with it. Maybe a couple of baluns would help.

I have discovered that while running Kyma and the Presonus from a laptop, the laptop's power supply adds hugely to the noise. If the laptop is made to run on batteries, the noise is reduced alot, but doesn't go away entirely. Perhaps the Presonus's own power supply is also affecting things. Maybe it'd do well with a ferrite ring/core?... Thinking out aloud here...

posted 29 July 2009 23:31            

I am coming to Melbourne in the not too distant future, perhaps within the next couple of months.

posted 30 July 2009 11:23            

We have had a report from someone who is using the FireBox with the Paca(rana) and unbalanced lines who said:

If the computer does not supply FireWire bus power, one configuration that works is to connect both the Paca(rana) and the FireBox to the computer's FireWire ports and use the power adapter to power the FireBox.

If the computer's FireWire ports supply bus power, you may get an improvement by plugging the computer into an ungrounded power outlet. Alternatively, you could try a PCI-E FireWire expansion card that does not supply bus power.

posted 01 August 2009 08:18            

With early non transformer balanced outputs it was best to leave the outputs cold un-connected as shorting it to ground would simply short out one op amps output. Now days many devices have transformer emulating line drivers that require the cold to be shorted to ground or you get almost nothing but pickup noise.

Another way to wire this is to connect only the cold of the balanced output to the ground of the unbalanced input and leave the ground of the balanced output un-connected. This can mean that the input gets a clean differential signal and any ground currents don't get through and ground loops are avoided. The only problem with this is if the noise in the differences between the grounds are too great, then it will be out of the range of the differential output and will not keep the signal clean.

Hope it helps

posted 11 August 2009 07:15            

SSC: The headphone monitoring appears to be quite clean.

With the main outputs: despite the fact that the computer doesn't supply buspower (since it is just via a PCM-CIA card slotted into a laptop) unplugging the power from the laptop still helped with about 50% of the noise, but the induction from comptuer processing still made its way through.

posted 12 August 2009 22:44            

I am working on a couple of films here in Adelaide. (I would have loved to have gone to the Kyma Symposium but alas, clashing commitments)

Perhaps I can drop you an email some time and find out more about your work with Kyma. I am still very much a novice, but step by step I am learning a bit more each time I spend time with it.

Cheers for now,