Introduction
Recently I got involved in the live recording of a symphonic orchestra plus choir. Setting up the necessary booms, microphones an cables takes about 3 hours, and for the recording it would be nice if we could place more microphones. Conclusion: we need to reduce the amount of work needed to set everything up. This can be done by skipping the cables and do everything wireless. However, (analog) wireless transmission is unsuitable because of the very large dynamic range which no analog wireless product can handle, while digital wireless product are scarce, very expensive and lack A/D clock sync, so have to be resampled, which makes it even more expensive.
Solution in which I need the arduino
The solution I designed is rather simple: take an A/D-converter (I'm looking at this one: http://www.cirrus.com/en/products/cs5381.html) for each microphone pair, read the data with a small computer/chip (I was thinking about the Arduino) and save it to an SD-card or something similar. To sync the clocks of these A/Ds, a central clock-chip sends the sync-signal raw over 2.4GHz, which is picked up and filtered by the chip and feeded to the jitter remover (http://www.cirrus.com/en/products/cs2000_family.html for example), which feeds the A/D. I need to work something out to amplify the microphone signal in advance though. If possible (however not really necessary) it would be nice if the Arduino could monitor the peak values of the signal and adjust the amplification, monitored and set over WiFi (I'll build some program to do that)
Edit: to make it a little bit more clear, every microphone (pair) gets its own amplifiers, A/D, chip and clock.
Question
I currently study mechanical engineering, but I'm a n00b at electrical engineering. I do have quite some programming skills though. Do I see things to simple, is this solution even possible, can it be done easier? Can an Arduino read serial data that fast and write it to an SD-card? If not, can anyone point me in the direction of an affordable, compact solution that does?
Well, thats a bummer. I guess those are quite a bit harder to work with. (as I'm not experienced with embedded systems) Is there something as high-level as a BeagleBoard and still able to communicate with an ADC?
[quote author=Richard Crowley link=topic=50444.msg359672#msg359672 date=1296400384]
I am also well-involved with location audio recording of live choral and orchestral performances, in fact for almost 50 years (since high-school). I agree that running cables for all those microphones is a major pain. HOWEVER, the ability to MONITOR the signal from each microphone, especially during a live performance is critical to achieving a successful recording, not to mention properly positioning the microphones during setup.[/quote]
Oh, yes, I didn't think about that... that renders this idea useless.
I did know of lectrosonics, but they're far to expensive, as far as I've seen prices. I couldn't find anything about prices from Zaxcom, but as the market potential is quite small, I expect about the same.
Currently, we are using the balanced audio JoeCo, a very nice device indeed. However, it isn't really compact.
Conclusion
As monitoring is impossible, this is a bad idea. Thanks for you advice! However, I still would like to work out at least a part of this idea, just for fun. I already mentioned beagleboard, is there something similar to that in processing power and ease of use and able to able to communicate with a ADC?
