The band played on… and on!

Whilst playing an unplugged acoustic guitar is the essence of making music it’s restricted by the choices in effects processors. But with the help of Analog Devices’ Blackfin processor, Fishman Transducers has designed its AFX pedals to play exactly what acoustic musicians want, plus many hours of unplugged operation on stage and in studio. Fishman uses the Blackfin ADSP-BF532 running at a power conserving 169MHz to perform 32bit audio effects processing in its AFX pedals. Because Blackfin integrates microcontroller functionality as well as dsp, there was no need to add a separate mcu that would have subtracted from battery life. With a standard alkaline 9V battery, a guitarist can look forward to some 20-25 hours of operation. “Analog Devices’ 32bit audio processing is a cut above in digital acoustic effects pedals, but you can be that sure players wouldn’t be as excited if they had to change batteries every performance,” said David Fournier, director of development, Fishman. “That’s why now, when Fishman has a digital product, we are using Blackfin. No other processor we compared could match the power efficiency.”