Hi Kurt,
The DAC certainly looks impressive - well done!
Out of 15 (including I guess 1 for you and 1 for Hurtig) you still have 13 left even after an audition with 10 audiophiles😕
Nic
The DAC certainly looks impressive - well done!
Out of 15 (including I guess 1 for you and 1 for Hurtig) you still have 13 left even after an audition with 10 audiophiles😕
Nic
I really hate to destroy one of your massive attempts to make us look bad (Try again). But this really is not a commercial product. We just had to order 15 PCB's from our supplier.
Imagine what other DIY'ers would do with the remaining PCB's...
That's why Kurt von Kubik mentioned, that when the remaining PCB's are gone, the show is over. Do you find that commercial or not??
BTW... we do NOT have 13 left. As far as I know, we are below 10 pcs!
Just to correct Kurt von Kubik:
The total BOM cost including transformers will exceed $300. My guess is closer to $350. And this is NOT including shipping/handling from different suppliers.
The total BOM cost including transformers will exceed $300. My guess is closer to $350. And this is NOT including shipping/handling from different suppliers.
It seems your main goal in life, is to make us look bad.... Keep up the good work 😀😀😀😀😀
But remember to get your facts right😉
.........................
Unfortunately you have both got off on the wrong foot. Your approach to the whole matter of promoting the DAC which you have developed has been both premature and far too much "in your face". People, quite rightly, feel that they do not want to have your (potential) product rammed down their throat. The reason is that, apart from being a trespass on their sensibilities, such an approach is considered to be at the best bad mannered and, at the worst, suspicious. The overall effect has been to give most people a very negative impression of you as product proprietors and to build up a strong sales resistance.
If your product is targeted solely at the DIY community you may already have done irreparable damage. My instinct would be to build a few more units and to attempt to find a company - with a good reputation - to build, market and sell the finished product under their own name. You can negotiate a licence fee + percentage points on a sliding scale based on sales performance. If you can afford the seed capital, you could attempt to launch your own brand - but do be aware you will need a very good marketer to help you as you clearly have no idea on the product promotion front. If your product IS as good as you state it should sell itself when marketed by a person/company with professional skills. Handle this aspect yourselves and it is dead in the water.
Lets put the past down to over-enthusiasm on your joint part.😉 An apology by way of a personal letter (by snail mail) to TPA would also do no harm!
We never intended to make this DAC commercial. We made it because we do not know of any DAC on the market, that will perform as good as we wanted i to.
Maybe we should have just ordered 2 PCB's (and still pay for 15). Maybe this could indicate that IT IS NOT A COMMERCIAL PRODUCT. This seems to be very hard to understand.
About TPA... I do not see any reason for an apology. We have generated a lot of attention to their products. They should be happy about that. And if not...
Well: Since I still belive that we have NOT said anything that isn't true, the problem must be in their own products.
Sorry to say! You´ve missed the point completely.
We do need no marketing at all, as this is not a commercial project.
And what we´ve said about our own project ad others as well, to this we stand tall.
We got som spares, which seems to anoy you in some way, but we will exclusively choose between nerds wanting one, as well as we will se to that no one gets more than one.
I do not know if you actually can read this without getting upset, but this DAC is THE ULTIMATE DAC You will not be able to find anything throughout this planet beeing implemented and developped this way.
At least I never came across anything like it, and frankly I´ve been pretty thorough looking for it. This because i wanted to buy it, but I could not find it anywhere. The closest thing ever was Spectral, just as I do respect some of Krell´s and Wadia´s urges for sound quality. Maybe there are a few in addition, but I´ve never seen it carried as far as we did. And then look at the price tags. The worst of all is, that it is impossible to us, to use more money to improve sound quality. Whatever we might want to do, it would only end up in µC´s, displays, remotes and profit for the distribution.
TPA makes money doing what they do, and that´s fine, let them do that, but to look for added value in their Buffalo DAC compared to the AN, we have looked in vain.
Then try to have a look for AN´s on all the chips used in our project. You will find AN used at very few occasions, namely the values and types of the decoupling caps in the logic section, and the values but not the types of decoupling caps in the filtering and voltage references. Everything else has not been seen ever before in projects like this, both commercial or DIY, and it probably will not be ever after. As it is either economical or matrimonial suicide, maybe even both.
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Well then, some anti-kudos has been unnecessarily generated.
I have to admit that many of your ideas sound reasonable and as it is NOT commercial I will withdraw that which I said in my last post with regard to positive marketing advice. But I cannot withdraw the opinion that your joint tone is far too brash or that I believe that you have (probably without intent) attempted to sabotage TPA's marketplace by busting in - uninvited - to glorify your own efforts at the expense of theirs.
We did not, and we had no reason for glorifying our own products as they are not at all commercial products.
Also we have no reason for sabotaging TPA´s business.
But we do have reason for pointing out that there is no value added to the Buffalo DAC what so ever, compared to the AN.
So it this.
So this is still going on?
Perhaps if you stop making all these unjustified claims about what you built you may get an ounce of credibility, though, the damage you've done already may not never be repaired.
As an example, remember when you thrashed ltspice that it doesn't simulate the output impedance of your regulator to the specs that you claimed? Well, your favourite product, orcad spice, gave me a very similar output impedance plot as ltspice, far from your claims though. There you go, you say I should just build your circuit and forget the simulations? Well, then why make claims based on simulations in the first place. How can one trust anything you say, when you don't recognize that you may have made a mistake, and instead blame everybody else for not being an engineer, or not using the right tools, etc. Join the jc thread, you'll fit right in.
Perhaps if you stop making all these unjustified claims about what you built you may get an ounce of credibility, though, the damage you've done already may not never be repaired.
As an example, remember when you thrashed ltspice that it doesn't simulate the output impedance of your regulator to the specs that you claimed? Well, your favourite product, orcad spice, gave me a very similar output impedance plot as ltspice, far from your claims though. There you go, you say I should just build your circuit and forget the simulations? Well, then why make claims based on simulations in the first place. How can one trust anything you say, when you don't recognize that you may have made a mistake, and instead blame everybody else for not being an engineer, or not using the right tools, etc. Join the jc thread, you'll fit right in.
First of all!
LT spice is not appropriate at all.
Orcad is doing the job, and doing excactly as you were told.
This is the reason Orcad is the reference amongst engineers and not LT spice.
On top of that measurements were made, and they showed excactly what you were told, and even better.
If you do not like that, we rest our case - so be it.
The best advice I can give you is - do not trust anyone, even LTspice.
We do not really need any credibillity, we offer a very few boards to those who by sight can recognise when things are done right.
That is what it is all about, nothing else.
So we still stand tall to: mOhms of output impedance from the shunts from DC to 10MHz. Our simulations in Orcad showed this to us, as well as measurements did.
We do not believe in your simulations, as you did alter our schematics, as well as you used different freeware to do the simulations, and you did not do any measurements at all. On top af that the active components used by you were different.
We are fully confident with our software, and even more with our measurements. And it works far beyound expectation.
You better buy some then 😀
Or build them yourself @ a few $ and save your money and time for a nice yacht instead😀
But from my heart I´d wish you were right.
It would really be a delight, if buildng with LEGO bricks was the ultimate and most precise way of construction ever.
Then everybody could be a construction engineer.
Unfortunately it is not so. Discrete analog design is a quest in which nobody really wants to participate, since it is both time consuming and you´ll have almost endless experiments to do.
Op-amps is much easier, and no disaster will happen. It is done within days, and most people will be nodding their heads in recognition, including you.
Only a very few makes still turns to discrete design, when the stakes are high.
Esoteric, Krell, Wadia, Spectral and others @ extreme price tags did discover the advantages of discrete design. Maybe also you will some day.
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I get your point... But still....
Generally we just wrote, that the TPA apporach looks pretty much like an application note, and nothing like High End. And if TPA feels this is negative, they might consider actually doing something high end, and not just another DAC like the others
I will NOT participate in some commercial hyping a mainstream design to be anything special. Just like some months ago, when I discovered a $25.000 DC-player with a so called "High End CD-Transport".... I then discovered that the transport was the same as in a $2.500 complete mini-stereo from Bang&Olufsen. Nobody will ever call it a high end transport in the Bang&Olufsen mini-stereo. But in a $25.000 CD player it suddently becomes high end. No way
But for some reason, audiophiles do not like these kind of unveilings. Better keep it a secret 😉
do you have something to offer to the diy community? like schematics and layouts so that people can make their own?
i know you will say that smallness of the design is a key to the sound, but would not the the same circuit (except maybe the most critical parts like clock,etc) made with through hole parts sound close enough to your dac to be the second greatest dac of all time? i m pretty sure we have some pretty qualified people here that would be enthusiatic enough to at least try to make a more diy friendly version of your dac, even if you say it would sound worse than the one from my Game Boy.
i know you will say that smallness of the design is a key to the sound, but would not the the same circuit (except maybe the most critical parts like clock,etc) made with through hole parts sound close enough to your dac to be the second greatest dac of all time? i m pretty sure we have some pretty qualified people here that would be enthusiatic enough to at least try to make a more diy friendly version of your dac, even if you say it would sound worse than the one from my Game Boy.
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Well... The main problem in your simulation was, that you were analyzing on a schematic not identical to ours (Still do not understand why you changed it) and using different components 😀 Pretty embarrassing... 😛
If you cannot get the results we have in OrCAD Pspice, it may be a problem in your simulation settings. Please email me the OrCAD file and I will run the simulation correctly for you. Also... You could try building the circuit and see that it also works real life.
Here are the similarities between the Buffalo32 and the ESS demo board:
We use the same DAC chip (obviously)
We use a few of the same values for decoupling caps near the DAC chip
We use the same comparator for level shifting, but in a different way
We use a buffer opamp for the analog supply, but in a different way
Everything else is completely different. Please get your facts straight.
I'll tell you what's embarrassing. To claim that a 1 mOhm resistor used for current sensing changes any of the results.
I've simulated your exact circuit with Orcad. Your results don't hold.
Why would I put so much effort into building a circuit that some people have designed in such way that I doubt everything about it? Would you do that?
You published your circuit now, other people will test it. The truth always goes up to the surface, just like oil in water.
Well.... We already uploaded the schematics in this thread. I do not remember the page (only 30 to search). Guess very few people do this before launching a commercial product 😉
About using leaded parts.... You really did not understand the whole idea of this DAC. It is not intended to be almost good enough. The goal has always been top performance. Anything else is not interesting at this state.
Change a single component, and you will hear it, if the rest of your gear is good enough. Guess the 10 audiophiles that visited us this weekend, discovered what this means 😉
Changing a large part of the design to different components, will lead to a completely different DAC. That's the main reason, we do NOT want to support people with bare PCB's... When people start using different parts and do not achieve the original performance, everybody will point their fingers at us.... Even though we have told several times, that using the right components is critical.
Only op-amp circuits seem to be more neutral to different components, because most of the changes will be burried underneath the low performance of the op-amp itself...
BTW... we are already struggling with a user claiming our specifications for the shunt regulators are incorret, because he cannot get the same result when simulation a DIFFERENT design in a low end simulator 😀
Get my point 😉
But in very short: Feel free to use the schematics we provided. But be aware, that you will most likely NOT end up with the same performance, even if you use the best possible parts. We tried that 4 years ago, and spend the time since then on component tweaking amongst others. You may be satisfied with the performance of a first shoot... We just decided to aim for the sky!
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