An unlikely amalgamation of Japanese enterprise and American engineering expertise points the way towards Fostex's future. Paul White visited their US R&D headquarters to see their Foundation 2000 — not so much a stepping stone as a bridge to a digital age.

The audio manufacturing industry is on a collision course with the computer industry — at least that was the impression gained from the New York AES show — and given SOS's coverage of the growth of digital audio and sequencing over the past few years, that probably comes as no surprise at all to you. But it does seem to have worried some audio manufacturers, especially those traditionally associated with analogue products. Analogue tape machines are the obvious first major casualty, so how are the companies associated with these products facing up to the future? One such company is Fostex, the audio arm of Japanese loudspeaker giant Foster.

Directly following the AES show in New York, SOS was invited by Fostex to visit their New Hampshire R&D facility, nicknamed FXR, where Fostex are literally laying the foundation of their future. Recognising that, as far as analogue recorders were concerned, the only light at the end of the tunnel was a train coming the other way, Fostex took their first step towards a digital future with their adoption of the Alesis ADAT format for their new RD8 digital multitrack tape machine. This was an unexpected move for a Japanese company — their culture, still steeped in the tradition of the Shogun leader and the Samurai warriors, makes this kind of alliance uncomfortable for them. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the extraordinary vision of Mr Shinohara, the President of the Fostex Corporation of Japan, the alliance would probably never have been considered.

Exciting though the ADAT alliance may be, it is generally recognised that the longer term future is in tapeless recording, the main obstacle currently being the price of the recording media itself. Hard disk drives cost many orders of magnitude more than a cassette of tape, which means that work has to be backed up after a session in order to free up the disk drive for re-use. The next generation of high-speed optical disks may solve the problem, but for multitrack work, conventional magnetic hard drives are necessary to achieve the required speed of operation. Fostex are more aware than most of all the variable parameters in the digital audio equation, but they are equally sure that it's the only way forward for them.

Following Fostex's unsuccessful buy-out attempt of New England Digital, the company behind the Synclavier, NED was wound up, leaving a very dedicated team of hardware and software engineers in the middle of New England with nothing to do. Mr Shinohara once again made a bold move, hiring virtually the entire team with a view to setting up the FXR research centre. Their brief was not to re-invent the Synclavier wheel, but instead to look into the future and design a totally new digital system that would be capable not only of being software upgradable, but which could also evolve to take advantage of new advances in both DSP technology and storage media as they became available. By adopting some very West Coast management ideas, and by working with unbridled enthusiasm towards a common goal, the team managed to turn their ideas into reality in around 11 months. Many of the more innovative features of Foundation 2000 are attributable to Cameron Jones, who previously headed the Synclavier design effort.

FOUNDATION 2000

We've established that the product is called Foundation 2000, but what exactly is it? That's a little like asking what a desktop computer is: is it a word processor, a games machine, a database, a graphics tool, a desktop publishing machine, or what? And the answer to the Foundation 2000 question is just as open-ended. In fact the desktop computer analogy is pretty close; just as an office computer is optimised for office tasks, Foundation 2000 is a computer platform optimised for audio. Unlike other forms of data, audio is a continuous medium, so there is no possibility of allowing the computer to pause while it does a few sums. Processing has to be continuous, very fast, and extremely organised, especially where multiple audio tracks are being handled.

Fostex seem reluctant to call Foundation 2000 a workstation, though it can handle all the tasks associated with an audio workstation. The current software only scratches the surface of the available processing power, but already the system can process 16 audio channels simultaneously, allowing full 8-track operation with real-time crossfades. The architecture supports 16-, 20- or 24-bit data formats, though the first release is restricted to 16-bit storage with 18-bit oversampling converters. Needless to say, Foundation 2000 is bristling with machine control, sync and interfacing options, with more on the way, but what really counts is the DSP architecture, which allows for future growth.

The system uses multiple DSPs, but the key to using these efficiently is to dynamically assign their power, much as an electronic keyboard assigns unused voices whenever new keys are depressed. Fostex have termed the phrase Random Access Dynamic DSP or RAD DSP for short. As shipped, the DSPs are Motorola 56002 devices, but because the DSPs are located on separate ACE (Algorithmic Computing Engine) circuit cards, the system performance could be enhanced by fitting newly designed ACE boards when better DSPs become available. A single Mix ACE card is provided as standard, allowing the machine to handle real-time mixing of eight audio tracks and EQ for up to 16 channels, but up to five further ACE cards may be added to provide additional facilities such as reverb, effects, dynamic control and so on.

THE ACHIEVEMENT

So what have Fostex really gained from the 30 or so man-years that have gone into Foundation 2000? Taking the product in its present form and with the present software versions, the more cynical might say they've come up with yet another 20 grand digital workstation targeting the film and video post market. But that would be to miss the point. Foundation 2000 is a dedicated audio computer, and simply by changing the control surface and the operating software, it has the capacity to be almost anything. Already an assignable mixing console work surface is in development which will turn Foundation 2000 into a tapeless, desktop recording studio, and if more channels are needed, multiple units may be linked together. Add a keyboard, plus appropriate software, and you could have a super sampler — the possibilities are there.

Though no firm decision has been announced, it seems certain that Fostex will throw open their doors to third-party software and hardware developers so that the system's performance can be increased in a modular way. According to the designers, there's enough DSP power to handle an effect on every channel, which could completely change the way we think about such things as aux sends. For example, if Lexicon were to supply a reverb algorithm, this could be made to run independently on all 16 mixer channels, presumably with different settings if need be.

"As Foundation 2000 grows more sophisticated and as software support expands, we can expect to see parts of the system 'broken off', to be sold as standalone products."

So, we have a super, open-ended, hi-tech workstation that can record, mix, edit and process, but at around £20,000, how does that relate to the average SOS reader? It's simply this: Foundation 2000 is the basis of the main thrust of Fostex's new product development, and it is likely to double as a test bed for a whole range of spinoff products. In other words, if in one or two years' time Fostex announce a MiniDisc multitracker for home use, the chances are that many of its operating hardware and software details will have been thrashed out on a Foundation system.

As Foundation 2000 grows more sophisticated and as software support expands, we can expect to see parts of the system 'broken off' to be sold as stand-alone products. The existing hardware has already set the scene for tapeless recorders, digital mixers, software-driven effects units and audio editing systems, not to mention Foundation's professional interfacing and sync capabilities, so we can only imagine what the future might bring.

Desktop multitrack recording studios are only in their infancy, but it won't be long before we look back at the hardware-heavy studios of yesteryear in much the same way as we at SOS look up from our Apple Mac DTP systems and shake our heads in disbelief at the manual setting of lead type that, until so recently, was the accepted way of producing newspapers.