The Gibson Digital Guitar, demonstrated last month at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle, is the first electric guitar to feature an Ethernet port on-board.  Using onboard electronics, the Gibson Digital allows players to send output from different strings to different amps or effect loops, as well as opening up the guitar’s traditionally analog signal to digital applications, like Internet streaming and single-string-per-track recording.

The real innovation here is in the media delivery system Gibson has designed to carry this information.  MaGIC, which stands for Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier, is a protocol that carries media information bi-directionally on a standard Ethernet cable.  Gibson’s goal for MaGIC technology is to replace all the cabling on musical instrument rigs as well as consumer electronics,  allowing users to daisy-chain devices and greatly simplifying audio system component hookup.  The MaGIC protocol carries 32 channels of digital audio over the single Ethernet cable.

Gibson has not yet released the digital guitar for sale, but has partnered with chipmaker Cirrus Logic to deliver a suite of digital audio and video products utilizing gigabit Ethernet connectivity in 2006.

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