I'm waiting for stereo components that connect to each other via an Ethernet cable and a hub.
Imagine a CD player, turntable, receiver, preamp, etc., that all have only two connectors: power, and Ethernet. You wouldn't have problems anymore with running out of connections on the back of your receiver. That incredible rats nest of disparate wires and cables would be gone. No more RCA cables, coax cables, HDMI, optical cables, composite video, supervideo, component video, BNC, various adapters, etc.
No more fumbling around the back trying to figure out which socket to plug the RCA cables into, which is input, which is output, etc.
problem with audio is delay. even all analog you already had delays (granted some of the analogs are acumulators so...) but all the formats you see in audio are just lots of people, all with differents ideas of trade offs for delay and easy of use. you are on the far right... so do not invent a new one and use what we already have there, which is optical i think.
I've talked with an electrical engineer who works for QSC on the part of their business that deals with large, coordinated installations. They run huge, theme park-sized systems over COTS networking gear (read: Ethernet) with audio synced within hundreds of nanoseconds at locations hundreds of meters apart. It's doable, but you're not going to see it in normal consumer hardware.
This. I once tried to repurpose an old Mac as a karaoke machine. Figured I could use the mac's built-in mic input. Absolutely unusable because of the ~50ms delay. Ended up having to buy a little analog mixer to make it work.
Actually modern switches have 400ns latency. Is that too slow? Hardware PTP support in your switches can get you clocks synced to close to a nanosecond accuracy, surely that's good enough?
Imagine a CD player, turntable, receiver, preamp, etc., that all have only two connectors: power, and Ethernet. You wouldn't have problems anymore with running out of connections on the back of your receiver. That incredible rats nest of disparate wires and cables would be gone. No more RCA cables, coax cables, HDMI, optical cables, composite video, supervideo, component video, BNC, various adapters, etc.
No more fumbling around the back trying to figure out which socket to plug the RCA cables into, which is input, which is output, etc.