Industrial or diy solid state card audio players, is there a paradigm?

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jgazal

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#1
I have been following several diy projects of solid state cards or flash cards (Secure Digital SD or Compact Flash cards, except micro drives) transports or players here at diyaudio.com:


Although I am a layman in electronic engineering, I presume some advantages of a solid state card audio player:

1) No moving parts (no cd transport mechanical challenges, error correction, no hard disk failures etc.), although a sd card dock wears out;
2) No digital connections (avoids usb jitter or noise from computers);
3) Short signal paths decrease jitter (you have a master clock right next to dac and let the sd card as a slave, allows internal i2s digital connections etc.);
4) Allows different audio files depending on what sd controller and dac is being used (there is no more media dependence (CD, DVD-Audio, SACD etc): accept internet downloaded 24bits/96khz-192khz-384(DXD) etc.) etc.
5) If a FPGA chip is used with proprietary digital to analog conversion codes, the bottlenecks would be Sd card data bandwidth, the FPGA computational power and proprietary algorithms (no more marriages with CD’s, DVD’s or SACD’s physical libraries).​

Personally, I have been looking for a product with digital outputs (i2s) that could work with a particular external digital sound processor.

I would rather have such processor already integrating an sd player with discrete balanced outputs (just to have a tight pcb integration as shown above plus discrete I/V stage without ic opamps), but I fear there is no room for that in this particular processor, so I will need a sd card transport, such processor and a external dac.

Several of those diy projects partially meet the criteria (some of them limited to SPDIF or to 16bits/44khz).

One industrial design has recently reached the market: Denon DNF-400 (D&M Pro - DN-F400 / RC-F400S Professional Solid State Audio System).

Sweetwater has a nice video showing its functionalities: YouTube - Denon Professional DN-F400 - Sweetwater.

It can be used without RC-F400S remote controller, but it has no digital outputs...

Anybody had access to this unit? I would like to see its topology (sd microcontroller, clock, digital paths, dacs, opamps etc.). I think it will be useful for those who are gently designing sd cards transport or players.

Although it does not meet my buying criteria, is Denon DNF-400 a paradigm for industrial solid state card audio players?

It is obviously designed for professionals, but would this concept (SD card audio players) reach the consumer market?

p.s.: Just a terminology observation - there is also Solid State Drives (SSD, i.e. http://www.crucial.com/store/ssd.aspx) being used at laptop computers and this kind of memory technology could be adopted for music servers (with vast memory capacity and no sd card slot wear out). But I have been reading that SSD has a much more complex topology than flash cards and this could somehow affect low jitter requirements. Anybody has more information on this subject?
 
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#2
The guys in our audio club that are into this, usually use SS Hard Drives along with a "normal" spinning hard drive, actually several. They have used Single Level Cell(SLC) Solid State Drive (SSD). They're pricey, last July a 256 Gb drive was about $700 and they have a limited lifespan as to how many times each cell can be written to, so you don't want to use it for Windows paging memory or defragment it very often. They can, OTOH, be read an almost infinate number of times...thank God.

The regular (quiet type) of spinning HD (usually several) are used for overall capacity, backup, and the source of normal, casual listening. However when when critical listening is desired then the SSD is used for playback.

With so many companies jumping onto the Hi Rez bandwagon, and it is very, very good indeed, the number of people taking this approach can only increase.

Good Luck on your project!

Best Regards,
TerryO
 
#3
Thanks for your post, TerryO.

Until now, I prefer Bunpei/Chiaki SDtrans192 (http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digi...ory-card-transport-project-5.html#post1922738) and TPA Buffalo 32 bits with spdif connections.

I've been searching for solid state recorders, but they are expensive and I am afraid no one is able to output sd written files while playing back the digital input stream.

Digital inputs seems to be acquired only for writing sd cards and not addressed to the dac for playback:



Not ready to go yet.

Best regards, Jose Luis
 
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