^ The R&D costs are high, even if you leverage stuff. Say you blow a measly $200K in the design and test - not to mention the distribution, sales, marketing, etc..- then your manufacturing will be costly because the bill of materials of expensive, low volume parts is gonna be... $$$$
So, if you build 200 of these things.... you have to amortize 1000 bucks per unit.... add the rest, and you're likely looking at amortizing 2500 per unit... AT LEAST. And that's reusing most of the firmware from an existing project.
You think the likes of yours truly works for peanuts? OK, very nice peanuts.
Eons ago the MBAs realized that there is no cost savings by outsourcing hardware and firmware to Bangalore, because we ended up blowing the schedule and budgets redoing it all from scratch.
So, if you build 200 of these things.... you have to amortize 1000 bucks per unit.... add the rest, and you're likely looking at amortizing 2500 per unit... AT LEAST. And that's reusing most of the firmware from an existing project.
You think the likes of yours truly works for peanuts? OK, very nice peanuts.
Eons ago the MBAs realized that there is no cost savings by outsourcing hardware and firmware to Bangalore, because we ended up blowing the schedule and budgets redoing it all from scratch.
You Sir has absolutely no clue what you are talking about. Jitter on an USB line is noting that exists or has any bearing on the final sound. I think you should stop giving advice on this topic. USB is an asynchronous interface where no clock whatsoever is transfered that is used for any audio conversion or clock extraction that has any impact on the discussion around jitter and sound quality.
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‘^’ I think you were being a bit trigger happy, what I was trying to get at eventually was that the EverSolo you are promoting is a much better design than the Ultra but being manufactured in China also doesn’t mean it will be cheap. Also impulse buying a cheap Chinese product doesn’t give you a good deal, you may have already realised that …
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Woah.... I might know a bit more than you give me credit for.
The "jitter" I'm referring to is based on Quality Of Service, not synchronizing the clock throughout the system. In my hardware World we were doing what you call "asynchronous data transfers" since... oh before I started in '79. Only the cheapskate consumer audio guys with their USB1 ever did it that way...
As in not sufficient bandwidth to handle the traffic so that one connection gets starved. Say you got two connections over a shared USB wire. One connection is audio, the other is data.
If you transfer big blobs of data, you might make both audio and data transfers "bursty".
If the designer of the USB serving the audio hardware takes this into account, they will have sufficient buffering ( caching ) at their end so that if the IO data becomes bursty they will not starve the DAC for data.
Comprende?
You know, I have spent a lot of time of my life with stuff like PCI, USB, Ethernet, etc.. bus analyzers looking at and programming the data transfers... Give me some credit. If you don't understand why I said something, just ask me what I mean, don't assume I don't know. I may just not be painting the full picture because I may make assumptions that the reader already knows.
The "jitter" I'm referring to is based on Quality Of Service, not synchronizing the clock throughout the system. In my hardware World we were doing what you call "asynchronous data transfers" since... oh before I started in '79. Only the cheapskate consumer audio guys with their USB1 ever did it that way...
As in not sufficient bandwidth to handle the traffic so that one connection gets starved. Say you got two connections over a shared USB wire. One connection is audio, the other is data.
If you transfer big blobs of data, you might make both audio and data transfers "bursty".
If the designer of the USB serving the audio hardware takes this into account, they will have sufficient buffering ( caching ) at their end so that if the IO data becomes bursty they will not starve the DAC for data.
Comprende?
You know, I have spent a lot of time of my life with stuff like PCI, USB, Ethernet, etc.. bus analyzers looking at and programming the data transfers... Give me some credit. If you don't understand why I said something, just ask me what I mean, don't assume I don't know. I may just not be painting the full picture because I may make assumptions that the reader already knows.
Don't know what you mean with trigger happy but I reacted to "what’s the source like?" with post #632 and it seems very hard in English to get the message through for some reason as things seem to be misunderstood or taken out of context as a standard. Also meaning A but saying B and cross replying both do not work out well.
The Eversolo (which I do not promote but simply own based on my requirements) is great, the Ultra seems to be great so both seem too be good candidates to be a decent source. The SMSL D6s is the best DAC I had for the price. No need to buy any factors higher priced stuff by single person operations for me/IMHO. Also not to DIY anything in that direction, it is over & out and it has been great but times are a-changing.
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That’s fine about quitting diy but since you are still here, just a quick question:
Does the smsl d6s sound better that the internal dac of the Eversolo?
Does the smsl d6s sound better that the internal dac of the Eversolo?
Again out of context. You missed the "also" and "in that direction" but I did not miss the "since you are still here". Who is trigger happy here?
It just seems the design teams in China know best how to develop well performing & well measuring stuff for affordable prices. Contrary to expectations and against personal preferences/experiences (dogmas?), maybe even bias my rack now consists solely of Chinese branded, Chinese made devices and ... all with internal SMPS. There has never been offered so much good HiFi for so little money as today.
It just seems the design teams in China know best how to develop well performing & well measuring stuff for affordable prices. Contrary to expectations and against personal preferences/experiences (dogmas?), maybe even bias my rack now consists solely of Chinese branded, Chinese made devices and ... all with internal SMPS. There has never been offered so much good HiFi for so little money as today.
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QoS? With a DAC asking for data from a streamer, on a differential BUS. Do tell more, please...
You are looking at it from a completely wrong angle. Melco switch does not have a switching power supply; hence, it can not spit rubbish back into the mains supply, where other devices that process analog signals are connected. That is very important if you really seek the ultimate sound quality. The Melco marketing blurb is for the uninitiated, with money to burn.
I'll help you understand what a Spernning Tree does:
Spanning Tree does not segregate network traffic. It prevents loops, calculates the cost and finds the switch with the lowest MAC address to operate. It provides redundancy and utilises paths with the highest possible throughput.
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You did not answer my question so that’s a big miss, maybe deliberately?
Anyway, for those interested, the Ultra has a compromised clocking arrangement - audio clock synthesised from a single clock on the Linkplay module. This will keep costs down a lot compared with the dual clock types but the sound from its internal dac is affected.The EverSolo has two expensive Accusilicons so a better design, re: clocks
In the diy world if someone comes up with a single clock arrangement like the Ultra, they will mocked to death.
The smsl d6s has a similar arrangement for clocking to feed its dac as the Ultra
- go figure
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Sweet. Nevertheless, you'll suffer less if you upgrade your first gen Eversolo with a liner power supply module.
All of the Eversolos (A6, A8 and A10) have WiFi and wired ethernet huh?
Pretty much, it looks like a unified DAC, streamer with IP based audio streaming. A damn good combination. Only issue, IMHO, it's not upgradeable.
The Nitsch with AD Multi Bit DAC and Unison at $850 is a very simple unit.... but the USB-DAC board is upgradeable and it's very simple unit.... but all the money went into the parts that are really important... if you can deal with USB input and no balanced outputs... the headphone is a nice plus... the unit really punches way above its price range.
The A6 costs as much as the WiiM Ultra with the Nitsch DAC. It has more inputs and outputs. The A6 has balanced outputs, a plus for those of us who have a preamp and amp that can handle it. But you are paying for those parts.... although being more of a volume unit, it's cheaper to manufacturer, while the Nitsch is almost a bespoke unit.
Nitsch might come out with a balanced output but that will be pricey, likely dual boards, one per channel. If they do, and add the latest Moffat USB/DAC circuits... at 1600 bucks it would be the giant killer. Assuming that Schiit allows to do that, of course.
IMHO, the Nitsch is a very unique animal, it has very few features, and it's almost hand made. It has an awesome USB circuit and DAC.
The A8 and A10 add more features, but they still stick with an off the shelf DAC... although pretty good.
I think I'll put down the deposit for the Schiit Byggy..... I mean, I would love to get a Nitsch with some of those circuits... no need for all that SPDIF, etc, etc... just gimme a USB-C interface and the SE and balanced outputs. Keep the analog volume gain and headphone jacks because no one is as insane as me... so they need to sell more units to headphone aficionados. I'm not retiring any time soon.
To tell you the truth. Mike Moffat has been a DAC genius since the 80s when he founded Theta, the man walks a different way. And my ears hear it.
Now, you might wonder... WTH is wrong with this guy? Doesn't he have enough DACs by now?
No.
Yes.
Well.... I might be selling the Topping D90LE. I paid 400 bucks. Any takers?
The Eversolos are extremely nice units, well integrated with the best off the shelf parts that you can get, but, but, Schiit's DACs walks a different way and I have become converted....
If buying off the shelf is good for you, then go for it... but if you want to be more involved in the process and don't want to build an R2R DAC... Nitsch is a very interesting proposition. So is Schiit. You can actually get a hold of them and sort of have conversations about the product and get involved with it.
And then you puts your money and wait. As close as DIY audio as you can get with what is in essence a niche manufacturer.
I haven't listened to anything else now for a week:
Samsung Android Tablet -> Wiim Ultra -> Nitsch with Unison Multibit DAC -> ET3SE -> Semisouth F6 -> Fostex P1000-E ( FF105WK) full range with a Rolls SX45 as low pass filter into Parasound ZAmp and Dayton Audio SUB-1000L subwoofer ).
I gave the description of the system because this is an INSANE combination.. No one in their right mind would put those speakers behind the front end (OK, I do have the Acoustic Energy AE1s in the stack too, but not wired).
Listening to Forever Young, Alphaville... the infamous 1980s drum synth comes out surprisingly very clean, no "splash", no smeared... and the whole soundstage is amazing ( guess having no crossover is a big thing... those Fostex are awesome ).
I guess I won't be retiring any time soon....
My home LAN has a delta configuration between the main managed switches.
The router and modem are on one side... the NAS servers (110TB) are on another node so what Spanning Tree does is to segregate the traffic going to the Internet over one side of the triangle while the traffic going from the NAS servers goes over the other side.
That way, if someone wants to watch movies over our Plex servers or goes out to Netflix it doesn't interfere at all with the traffic going out to the Tidal servers.
If were to choose to watch Netflix from my home office I would be indeed putting traffic over where Tidal is usually routed... but since I'm the only one, it should not affect the GigE wire.
I know what Spanning Tree is... I wrote part of the code in '94.
The reason why I have it at home is obvious... I just explained it to you.
BTW. you completely missed my point... did you? I'm gonna smoke a cigar... reread my post and then, if you still conflate USB with Ethernet, then ask again and I will explain it to you.
A few pages back, you asked about the most basic question: how to assign an IP address to WiiM. You were given the answer. You then went on to describe how you developed a space shuttle firmware... Why??? In what context??
You kept telling everyone how experienced a network specialist you are, but you discarded the suggestions that anyone who has ever touched networking would know are perfectly acceptable and widely used.
What is really unacceptable is that you used the provided suggestion, in good faith, mind you, to rub your "knowledge and expertise" in everyone's noses.
And then you also start with Comprende..?? Seriously??? Comprende what?
Interesting. Did you write the firmware for the new delta network topology as well??
There are no sides. What sides are you talking about??? One switchport will be in blocking state, to prevent a loop. There can be only one path chosen by the Spanning Tree protocol, all traffic will be passed along that path.
The path chosen is calculated based on the cost.
The other side, as you call it, is in the blocking state. Apart from the very low network utilisation caused by spanning tree traffic packets, for the redundancy to work correctly, no other network packets can be passed through that side.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Even on a 100Mbit/sec backbone, worrying about network utilisation in your use case is ludicrous. Unless you have flooded the network with broadcasts, which wouldn't surprise me at all. You obviously never analysed network utilisation/packets in your whole life.
But you use a Gigabit backbone at your place? Aha, sure.
But of course you did.
Man, keep digging that hole as deep as you like. I'll be here to encourage you.
You kept telling everyone how experienced a network specialist you are, but you discarded the suggestions that anyone who has ever touched networking would know are perfectly acceptable and widely used.
What is really unacceptable is that you used the provided suggestion, in good faith, mind you, to rub your "knowledge and expertise" in everyone's noses.
And then you also start with Comprende..?? Seriously??? Comprende what?
Interesting. Did you write the firmware for the new delta network topology as well??
There are no sides. What sides are you talking about??? One switchport will be in blocking state, to prevent a loop. There can be only one path chosen by the Spanning Tree protocol, all traffic will be passed along that path.
The path chosen is calculated based on the cost.
The other side, as you call it, is in the blocking state. Apart from the very low network utilisation caused by spanning tree traffic packets, for the redundancy to work correctly, no other network packets can be passed through that side.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Even on a 100Mbit/sec backbone, worrying about network utilisation in your use case is ludicrous. Unless you have flooded the network with broadcasts, which wouldn't surprise me at all. You obviously never analysed network utilisation/packets in your whole life.
But you use a Gigabit backbone at your place? Aha, sure.
But of course you did.
Man, keep digging that hole as deep as you like. I'll be here to encourage you.
I know how to assign an IP address to the WiiM Ultra.. you told me to use dynamic addressing... so what? That's how my units are set up by default, using DHCP... but I ran into some aging issues with WiiM Home running in the PC... hence I want to try out using static IP addresses.
Then I was told that static IP addresses should not be used... was that you? I ignored that. Sorry, but that's is really bad advice. How do you handle servers in a network? For those, you need static IP addresses... yes, you do.... God forbid you try having FTP servers in your network.... I do, BTW.
Whatever...
(1) ascomTimeplex, feel free to look it up. I'm sure I don't have to tell you who Cisco is.
(2) I made a point of telling you that my ethernet LAN is designed to distribute traffic. Do you have an issue with that description?
(3) I noted that using multiple devices over a USB hub might create burstiness in some connections that could cause low latency interconnections -like voice- an issue unless the developers took care to incorporate sufficient caching. Do you have an issue with that?
(4) GigE is dirt cheap, has been since oh 20 years ago. Today people are using 10GigE. Do you have an issue with that?
(5) A Delta Topology is the simplest implementation that requires spanning tree because it presents at least two routes across it. Do you understand that? The hop calculation can be deceiving because some hops are more costly than others... as in a voice connection over a low latency, high bandwidth number of hops might be preferrable over a an single hop over a slow connection that is oversubscribed. In my simple fabric, Spanning Tree is required to prevent loops, but the traffic congestion is handled by the careful assignment of clients and servers in the topology... meaning.. imagine an isosceles triangle. The clients and servers are alongside the bottom side... while the Internet is at the top tip.
(6) QoS is intrinsic with Spanning Tree nowadays. That's something we leveraged from the days of ATM. But again, see (5) above to see how it doesn't affect the IP behavior in my LAN.
(7) USB... I only use hubs for data transfers. I got rid of the USB-C hubs I used to have. That means point-to-point connections.
Bottom line is, relax a bit, OK? I actually know what I'm doing.
If not, then go read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Internetworking-TCP-IP-One-6th/dp/013608530X
I believe it will satisfy all of your questions without insulting me....
And yes, I've been doing Internetworking since before it was called the Internet.
Then I was told that static IP addresses should not be used... was that you? I ignored that. Sorry, but that's is really bad advice. How do you handle servers in a network? For those, you need static IP addresses... yes, you do.... God forbid you try having FTP servers in your network.... I do, BTW.
Whatever...
(1) ascomTimeplex, feel free to look it up. I'm sure I don't have to tell you who Cisco is.
(2) I made a point of telling you that my ethernet LAN is designed to distribute traffic. Do you have an issue with that description?
(3) I noted that using multiple devices over a USB hub might create burstiness in some connections that could cause low latency interconnections -like voice- an issue unless the developers took care to incorporate sufficient caching. Do you have an issue with that?
(4) GigE is dirt cheap, has been since oh 20 years ago. Today people are using 10GigE. Do you have an issue with that?
(5) A Delta Topology is the simplest implementation that requires spanning tree because it presents at least two routes across it. Do you understand that? The hop calculation can be deceiving because some hops are more costly than others... as in a voice connection over a low latency, high bandwidth number of hops might be preferrable over a an single hop over a slow connection that is oversubscribed. In my simple fabric, Spanning Tree is required to prevent loops, but the traffic congestion is handled by the careful assignment of clients and servers in the topology... meaning.. imagine an isosceles triangle. The clients and servers are alongside the bottom side... while the Internet is at the top tip.
(6) QoS is intrinsic with Spanning Tree nowadays. That's something we leveraged from the days of ATM. But again, see (5) above to see how it doesn't affect the IP behavior in my LAN.
(7) USB... I only use hubs for data transfers. I got rid of the USB-C hubs I used to have. That means point-to-point connections.
Bottom line is, relax a bit, OK? I actually know what I'm doing.
If not, then go read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Internetworking-TCP-IP-One-6th/dp/013608530X
I believe it will satisfy all of your questions without insulting me....
And yes, I've been doing Internetworking since before it was called the Internet.
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Go figure, some could not care less if the clocks were made of chocolate as long as the results are good. My Eversolo also does not have Accusilicon XO's either. What technically is near perfect does not necessarily translate to best practical results. The reverse also can be true. And there is "more than good enough for the goal" too as entertainment stuff is usually used in normal homes not labs. One can use the best wine to make vinegar but does it then taste differently?
I think this thread has run its ugly course. I will ask the mods to close it as new insights and even slight modifications have not seen daylight AFAIK.
WiiM Ultra just seems to punch way above its weight and that is admirable as the reverse happens more often. The intention of the thread was practical, to see modifications and improvement ideas by owners of this cheapo that have the guts to open it and maybe see some cut corners and possibly solve them. That does not take away that is IS a cheapo punching above its weight and this without the best clocks in the world. The first that delivers in many areas for a low budget and is liked by many.
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Well, I'm having a good time with the Ultra, even if it has foibles.
Wife knows how to use it and I get bit perfect audio.... so, I guess that's what matters to me.
The Eversolos are neat, I must admit, they are actually superb. If they had a replaceable DAC board I would get one... my concern at those prices is that the DAC will be upgraded every other year whereas the IP interface and analog circuitry will likely last for a long time...
The 6 is nice, but the 8 and 10 are indeed delectable, and likely a lot easier to use than the Ultra.
And the Ultra is a neat toy that allows us to drive USB DACs for pretty cheap.
Don't close it, just keep an eye on people who lose track of the object, which is the Ultra... there is indeed too much name calling...
Wife knows how to use it and I get bit perfect audio.... so, I guess that's what matters to me.
The Eversolos are neat, I must admit, they are actually superb. If they had a replaceable DAC board I would get one... my concern at those prices is that the DAC will be upgraded every other year whereas the IP interface and analog circuitry will likely last for a long time...
The 6 is nice, but the 8 and 10 are indeed delectable, and likely a lot easier to use than the Ultra.
And the Ultra is a neat toy that allows us to drive USB DACs for pretty cheap.
Don't close it, just keep an eye on people who lose track of the object, which is the Ultra... there is indeed too much name calling...