(Hey all, wasn't sure if this was the best forum for the topic, please redirect as needed. With that out of the way...)
Hi everyone, my name is Casey Cook, and we've just started using the Jamlinks with our band. We're a rock/punk trio with guitar and bass in one location and our drummer roughly 35 miles away. We're not only playing together with good results, but we also stream the session via ShoutCast to fans in the virtual world SecondLife as well as to people that follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
More specifics and thoughts for anyone interested-
Got the units hooked up Friday for the first run. I went with the simple mixer setup, guitar bass and vox on my end into the mixer and then out to the Jamlink, headphone out on the Jamlink to the line in on my soundcard for streaming, then speaker out jack of the soundcard to my headphone amp for monitoring. This didn't work that well, the signal out of the Jamlink was a bit low and I couldn't boost it enough in the control panel to compensate. We also had some other clipping problems, related to the same thing- I was just driving my signal too hard going into the Jamlink to compensate for the relatively low output.
I went back and rewired to the pro sound set up, sent a sub group of guitar bass and vox to the Jamlink, ran the headphone out of the Jamlink to a stereo channel on the board and ran that to my computer for streaming and monitoring. This worked quite a bit better. We need to tweak some levels and EQ, but it is very workable.
We encoded at 22khz and I had Jitter up to 6, I will try pulling that down a little next time out, I think I overcompensated for some marginal clicks that I could hear when there was silence on the line. We're both running cable connections with 2+ MB upstream. We play with a metronome, which gave us a very good sense of any latency 'drift' or tempo movement. Mostly it was very good, and we play with a lot of starts and stops and breaks etc. It did move around a bit in places, I am hoping we can improve it a bit more by pulling down jitter, and will update with results.
Overall I think they work great. Suggestions/requests-
- A VU meter in the web interface would help track down clipping problems. Even better, a physical trim control knob in future versions.
- Higher output on the headphone (as I saw is potentially in the works already)
- The option for a stereo input mode (which I am sure is a big bandwidth hit)
- A session log that saves locally
Good job to the MusicianLink team! If I can answer any questions for anyone, please ask away.
Cheers-
Casey Cook
Hi Casey.
Thank you very much for the feedback and suggestions.
The things you have asked for have also been very frequently requested by others. We are currently in the process of developing a firmware update which will incorporate most of these as well as some other new features to improve the overall quality and performance of the jamLinks.
We will keep you posted.
Thanks,
Dave