GDC SR-1000 Stand Alone Media Block and Enterprise Storage Playback Problems

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

We have seen one SR-1000 on our NOC do what you are describing. It was a brand new server and it would hang in between clips, randomly miss cues and also occasionally skip over a DCP here and there in the playlist! It was a lemon out of the box. You should run a show noting the exact timestamp things went wrong, then contact GDC support and send them a set of logs along with your timestamp notes. I'll bet the resolution will be to send you a replacement unit.

LOL wait for Mark to chime in saying GDC has NEVER made a lemon in 3, 2, 1........


EVERY manufacturer has sent out a lemon, either in design (CP45, CDS, ALL versions of SDDS, Solaria One, and Strong's switchers) or by simple parts failures outside of the control of the manufacturers.

I've had first hand experience in all of the above except for the CDS systems. I knew one private collector who had the CDS system but he could never get it to work reliably even with having several other techs try. I refused to even touch it.

Edited to add: IIRC on the old forum there was a thread discussing CDS, and it's main issues were excessive heat buildup in the electronics and of course the real elephant in the room, no ability to have the analog optical/mag backup track.

[Leo Enticknap]

To be fair, CDS was essentially an experimental system: it never made it into mass production/rollout, but it did manage to prove the concept, thereby laying the groundwork for the three optical digital film audio systems that did. As for no redundancy, there was also no redundancy against an exciter lamp blowing mid-show (before the days of LED exciters), but this happened so rarely as to be considered a nonissue. And 70mm DTS doesn't have any fallback option, either, but again, it turned out to be as reliable any analog playback system without a backup. The only one that had serious, design flaw-caused dropout issues was SDDS, in my experience.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

To be fair, CDS was essentially an experimental system: it never made it into mass production/rollout, but it did manage to prove the concept, thereby laying the groundwork for the three optical digital film audio systems that did. As for no redundancy, there was also no redundancy against an exciter lamp blowing mid-show (before the days of LED exciters), but this happened so rarely as to be considered a nonissue. And 70mm DTS doesn't have any fallback option, either, but again, it turned out to be as reliable any analog playback system without a backup. The only one that had serious, design flaw-caused dropout issues was SDDS, in my experience.

All excellent points. IIRC CDS also had the best actual sound quality of all the digital incarnations too... it was a bit of a shame that it couldn't evolve the CDS codec into a stable platform. I will give it credit for being a giant bold leap for its time.

It disturbs me to realize that this was all in the distant past, like 30 years or so. I have been really suffering with the effects of my age lately.

[Marcel Birgelen]

CDS may be just a few years ahead of its time, but their fatal flaw was to ditch the analog soundtrack, against better judgement, because apparently that was a management decision. Not only removed this a crucial bit of redundancy, it also didn't allow CDS prints to be used on non-CDS-equipped screens, which were practically all of them. I think that if they hadn't done that, their system may have had a chance to hang on.

Because, the time for "digital" was pretty much ripe at the turn of the decade as the 80s became the 90s: analog records were on their way out and digital recordings on CDs were the new standard. While eventually all of those formats more or less failed, there was a big push for digital recording media, like DAT and DDS cassettes and the MiniDisc which came out in the early 1990s.

The other thing that killed CDS was the high bitrate needed, which may have resulted in the best sound of all the film-based digital audio system, but which also made the system complex and prone to film degradation.

Dolby, DTS and later Sony made use of clever inventions by the likes of Fraunhofer IIS, who developed a viable audio compression scheme which we all know as MP3 nowadays. Those kind of audio compression technologies allowed to greatly reduce the data rate. While this did reduce the quality of the audio itself by introducing a massive form of compression, the greatly reduced bitrates helped to implement viable solutions, like storage on CDs and as digital optical data on film.

[Brad Miller]

Brad - was your citric SR-1000 in an IMB to Series 1/HD-SDI adapter chassis, or just regularly installed in card cage of a Series 2/3/4 projector? If the latter, that would suggest that Steve's problem might not be in the adapter.

It was in an Series 2 projector.

[Paul Finn]

DTS did have a dual processor and cabling option available for redundancy in 70mm installations. I believe everything was duplicated in the system after the time code reader(s). The 70mm time code track on the film is very robust and I don't remember any reels of film with defective time code tracks.

Paul Finn.

[Barry Floyd]

I have two GDC SR-1000's with the rack mounted Enterprise Storage Plus drive arrays. Bought these back in December of 2020 to replace our aging SX2000-AR's. There was nothing wrong with our old servers (other than age), but we needed to spend some money at the end of the year for tax reasons.

I installed the SR-1000's into our Barco DP2K-23B's in mid February and honestly, they've performed flawlessly ever since. The new user interface through the web GUI is daunting at first. I was only used to my previous SX2000AR's, so these took a little getting used to. I miss the touch screen interface I had with my older servers, but honestly once I get my playlist built and scheduled, I don't really have to tough them. We have ours tied into a GPIO automation panel made by American Cinema Equipment and it triggers lights, exhaust fans, sound processor and our employee alert chimes. We don't experience the random flashes on screen between files, its just a second or two of dark screen. Our SX2000AR's did the same.

Did you try updating the server software? I had to update both of ours as soon as I installed them.