Procyon features

[agmz30]

Am on the verge of buying the Procyon but need some info :
i) The booklet says that despite having crisp digital sound , Procyon still can't do some things as well as good 'ol Proteus . Is this just a software problem or is there some inherent hardware limitation ? The sound on the Proteus was pretty limited so one would assume that yer 'crisp digital sound' would be like some major breakthrough ?
ii) Curious ' bout the goggles : do they use leds ; if so , how many ? Read that they?re really ultrabright .

[Andy]

First of all, I'll have to admit that I haven't seen this "booklet", and have only worked with the protoype, not the final product.

I'm not sure what things the Procyon can't do that the Proteus can, but I can't think of anything. Certainly the Procyon far surpasses what the Proteus can do for everything I've tested it on.

The goggles use 3 LEDs (Red/Green/Blue) which can be blended to give infinite colours. They can be very bright if you want. As always, the brightness is completely adjustable.

[Robert Austin]

Greetings--the Procyon current implements just sine wave synthesis, while the Proteus includes four waveforms, and we eventually added waveform cross-fading as part of an OS upgrade.

Although the Procyon CPU is 2.5 times faster than that within the Proteus, we chose to focus on color synthesis--since the lights have a significantly larger effect than does sound, and since most people add their own audio to the "mix". We will continue to work with upgrading audio and other features of the Procyon in the coming months, adding the most-requested features first. So, if we have enough CPU bandwidth available following optimization, we will be expanding synthesis capabilities!

--Robert

[bodyalive]

Hello all,

I had my first opportunity to use the new Procyon, doing two different sessions. I found the new colors to be quite pleasant... much more of a mandala or kaleidescope effect than the Proteus. And at first read through of the manual, I appreciated the variety of new sessions. Stating the predominate hertz rate in some of the session descriptions was most helpful. Can I see a chart with specific hertz rates for all of the factory sessions?

Also, is the session editor available?

I'll post more observations here soon.
Thanks,
Brian Cummings

[Dave]

Greetings--the Procyon current implements just sine wave synthesis, while the Proteus includes four waveforms, and we eventually added waveform cross-fading as part of an OS upgrade.

The Procyon avs manual says that it supports sine, pulse and triangle waveforms. Did you mean that the Proteus only supports sine wave synthesis?

[Robert Austin]

Greetings--the waveforms you refer to are actually the light waveforms, not audio; the Procyon currently generates just sine waves though we expect we will add others with new firmware releases. No LS machine currently on the market can synthesize audio which sounds as good as CDs, and so we have focussed on light control, since most users have both CD players and a wide range of CD content to choose from.

We do use LEDs in our eyewear, as we always have--but they are now surface-mount and very thin, unlike the old "bulb" LEDs, and don't protrude towards the eyes anymore (or into the eyes for a small group of people)! Expect to see our competitors move to this technology in the near future... ;-)

Robert

[gordon]

I am looking for a live on-the-fly sync of my glasses to audio input. The effect would be more lightshow than anything else, but it seems to not be supported on the procyon despite an audio input. I'd love to be able to upload an Mp3 on my procyon for instance and have the machine sync the flashing lights to the beat of the music, or at the very least have the glasses sync to music being inputted from another device such as an ipod. Will this be coming infuture firmware updates? Pretty please

[Robert Austin]

Hi, Gordon--the Procyon doesn't have circuitry for doing this sort of decoding, and the CPU isn't fast enough to analyze the incoming audio stream. There IS a solution to this, and we've investigated it in prototype, but it requires additional chip(s).

Actually, this is a possibility if a PC does the analysis and drives the Procyon--something for an intrepid programmer to write?

We've also thought about adding an internal MP3 player to some future model. But it would cost more than a commercial player, since we make thousands of machines at a time, not millions, so we pay more for components (a lot more) than, say, Apple or Creative.

--Robert

[samtara]

I just received my procyon- had some trouble with the drivers- but what I really want to know is-
Can I get the lights in the glasses to play in synchrony with an external music source- or do I have to do some kind of programing to get that result?
thanks.

[samtara]

I hope if you are designing a biofeedback system that you include the capability for HRV as well as GSR. If you do, Id be interested, but not if it is just GSR.
You will have to make something that is competitive with Healing Rhythms- a hard to beat system now.