CS8420 is lousy?

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Other than the "glitch" while using this ASRC in software mode what exactly is the problem sound-wise with this chip?
It sounds okay to me and from a theoretic standpoint I find the engineering backing this device to be beyond reproach.
Can anyone here confirm the reasons for the lacklustre performance of this convertor with hard evidence?

Just curious,
Jim
 
The CS8420 is unbelievably useful... AES transmitter/receiver and SRC integrated into a single chip, and the cost is excellent.

The audio performance isn't that good by today's standards - the cheap AD1895/SRC4190 chips beat it, and the AD1896/SRC4192 chips completely humiliate it. It also has an upper limit of 96KHz... but for CD quality applications, it's adequate.

Now the bad part: there's so many stupid little bugs in the CS8420 that I won't design it into anything. Here's what I've personally encountered:

- the AES transmitter won't start up unless you connect an AES input, even for a moment.
- unplugging/plugging an AES input can cause the chip to put out heavily distorted audio
- the reset workaround for the unplugging/plugging trick doesn't work 100% of the time. Sometimes resetting the chip can throw it into the distorted state.

And I learned these things by designing the CS8420 into a board then having to scrap the boards and redesign without the chip, which leaves me a bit bitter. And a couple weeks ago, I was on the phone with someone from another audio equipment company who shared this gem: "I had to get on a f---ing plane because of a CS8420."

For the home experimenter, the CS8420 bugs are tolerable. When you're designing professional audio equipment which has to work 100% of the time with no user interaction, the chip is unacceptable.
 
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