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TPA - USB Transport

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Let's see: 10G over CAT6A is 55m max. That's a fairly delicate cable BTW, too much bending or hanging out of an outlet for too long (just it's own weight) will ruin performance. But it's less than 1$/m so that's fine for widespread usage in buildings.

Displayport indeed supports 17.3Gbps, but only for up to 3m. It's also fairly expensive, at around 10 times the price of CAT6A.

And there's infiniband, running up to 30 Gbps @ x12/SDR, and even higher in DDR or QDR configurations. But those cables are around 100 times the price of CAT6A, and again 3m max. in general.

It's a trend: as we raise the bandwidth, the maximum cable length goes down and the price goes up. We're not too far from the point where optical fibres are cheaper to use, even in everyday equipment. And that's where Lightpeak is for: a chip with 4 links is projected to cost around 10$, and if we look at the patching price: short OM3 cables are around the same price of displayport. But OM3 is capable of doing runs of 600m instead of just 3m.

Going back to the USB receiver: Russ, is it possible to design it with a standard IDC connection (AKA what's on most PC mainboards)? That way people could use the cheap USB brackets delivered with many mainboards to mount it in the chassis. They're cheap and very easy to mount.
I mean brackets like this one: http://www.createch.com.tw/images/usb/usb-bracket01-x30-1-80.jpg
 
I don't know if this helps but it seems there is somebody working on the alsa drivers...

XMOS USB Audio Class 2.0 Reference Design -- ALSA Devel

Apart from this I have the impression that the audio industry doesn't care about linux too much... but they are wrong :p

Best Wishes
Pietro

Thanks for the link. Does this mean that I could use this driver with the TPA USB device under Linux? And yes, it is wrong to ignore Linux...
 
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