• Disclaimer: This Vendor's Forum is a paid-for commercial area. Unlike the rest of diyAudio, the Vendor has complete control of what may or may not be posted in this forum. If you wish to discuss technical matters outside the bounds of what is permitted by the Vendor, please use the non-commercial areas of diyAudio to do so.

Designing a practical ES9038 based eight channel DAC

Status
Not open for further replies.
I have the DIYINHK board. They do not offer driver or configuration software and as supplied it is limited to 24 bit on a mac at least. It doesn't sound as good as the Amanero, and it has to be the master deriving the audio clocks from non integer math.

Thanks for pointing out the MiniDSP MCHStreamer. I was unaware of this newer model. I have one on order, we will see what delivery time from China is these days.

Does anyone know it the IAN FIFO is limited to just one stereo data stream?
 
I have the DIYINHK board. They do not offer driver or configuration software and as supplied it is limited to 24 bit on a mac at least. It doesn't sound as good as the Amanero, and it has to be the master deriving the audio clocks from non integer math.

Thanks for pointing out the MiniDSP MCHStreamer. I was unaware of this newer model. I have one on order, we will see what delivery time from China is these days.

Does anyone know it the IAN FIFO is limited to just one stereo data stream?

Is the MiniDSP MCHStreamer really any good? They do not specify the audio clocks they use, and their XMOS chip is only half as powerfull as the DIYINHK. I heard the MiniDSP generates the audio clocks in the XMOS chip, which would not be ideal.
I use the DIYINHK on windows, 24 bit max also. Sound is great, but I don't have the Amanero to compare against.
 
All XMOS run as master and suffer from having to derive thier audio clocks.

Just found out the MiniDSP inputs are limited to 24 bit just like the DiYINHK boards, only the outputs support 32 bit. This matters because global attenuation and crossover filtering are all happening upstream at the computer source. I have found by listening that you need at least 4 bits of additional bit depth to preserve resolution when altering the data, I.E. volume or EQ, perhaps due to mathematical rounding. As I am doing both I believe I need 8 bits in addition to the 16 original bits or 24 bits. If I need to attenuate approximately 30 db for an average listening level that would be almost 29 bits needed to not hear the effects of processing, as 5 bits would be thrown away prior to being sent to the DAC. Some masking happens with volume reduction. Hey aren't these first world problems somewhat ridiculous given the current world situation? Still, I maintain that the effects of great sounding music on people far more influential than I am, can positively impact all of our lives more than we know.

Also the McFifo is no longer available and the newest only seems to support 4 ch audio.

All I want is for our technical trickery to exceed our inherent ability to percieve.
 
Haha, I agree with you on wanting the technical best.
I did not know it to be possible to do EQ/DSP on DSD?
Using the attenuation in the ES90x8 chip, there is hardly any effect on resolution. So I mainly use software to control the channel volumes over I2C.
The XMOS uses a FIFO buffer on the I2S output. The DIYINHK clocks these uaing exter al NDK oscillators. The MiniDSP uses the MCU clock derivative.
 
All XMOS run as master and suffer from having to derive thier audio clocks.

The ones I've seen use dedicated audio frequency clocks, they don't derive anything. That's much better (in my opinion) than modern DAC chips that use a generic 100MHz clock and divide from that.

Just found out the MiniDSP inputs are limited to 24 bit just like the DiYINHK boards, only the outputs support 32 bit.

Is this a Mac limitation? Because both the diyinhk and MCHStreamer boards work with 32bit input via USB on Linux. Minidsp even lists it in the release notes for the firmware:
Add support for 32bits Input for firmware have I2S or TDM input.

marcelooms said:
I did not know it to be possible to do EQ/DSP on DSD?
Roon and HQPlayer can do it, bit it takes a lot of CPU power. Roon shows that it's using something like 2M taps for the FIR filters.
 
Update:

10 ch linear phase horn speaker installation. (not mine unfortunately)

I have successfully implemented a MiniDSP MCHStreamer as a 10 channel output. Eight ch are I2S at 32 bit feeding Ian's McFifo with the outputs buffered via transporters as LVDS balanced lines running to four Twisted Pear 38 Pro DACs. The remaining two ch are 24 bit SPDIF buffered and transformer isolated, feeding additional mono block Buffalo 3 Dacs for the sub frequencies. All crossover and timing delay adjustment is handled with plug ins in Reaper which is fed internally by JRiver.

I can strongly recommend the MCHStreamer Ian McFifo combination as it allows true audio domain Xtal re-clocking and provides the various buffered outputs needed to drive all the DACs. Obviously an 8 ch DAC would be much simpler and more cost effective but if you can't wait or want to go to the max.

Thanks to all who helped with recommendations for the various components needed to make this work. It was a truly international effort with pieces from Hong Kong, Canada, France, and of course TP here in the USA.
 
Update:

10 ch linear phase horn speaker installation. (not mine unfortunately)

I have successfully implemented a MiniDSP MCHStreamer as a 10 channel output. Eight ch are I2S at 32 bit feeding Ian's McFifo with the outputs buffered via transporters as LVDS balanced lines running to four Twisted Pear 38 Pro DACs. The remaining two ch are 24 bit SPDIF buffered and transformer isolated, feeding additional mono block Buffalo 3 Dacs for the sub frequencies. All crossover and timing delay adjustment is handled with plug ins in Reaper which is fed internally by JRiver.

I can strongly recommend the MCHStreamer Ian McFifo combination as it allows true audio domain Xtal re-clocking and provides the various buffered outputs needed to drive all the DACs. Obviously an 8 ch DAC would be much simpler and more cost effective but if you can't wait or want to go to the max.

Thanks to all who helped with recommendations for the various components needed to make this work. It was a truly international effort with pieces from Hong Kong, Canada, France, and of course TP here in the USA.

Problem with Mchstreamer is that clock should be split/buffered. There is only one GND instead every second pin. In order to connect several DAC's split/buffer interface should be used. Maybe Ian McFifo can do that job. I'm not sure. Anyway McFifo is not available any more.
 
Breakout buffers with multiple master, D1 and D2 lines were part of the dual xo board also from Ian. I know they are no longer listed on audio phonics site but have you checked with Ian directly? Really sad if no longer available. For an 8 ch DAC to be practicle you need a way to feed it, so a TP version of a multi channel usb to I2S with great clocking choices is needed even more than the 8 ch version of the DAC IMHO.
 
The real problem with the MCHStreamer is that it only runs in master mode so you need a FIFO to reclock the stream. I prefer the sound of a FIFO without a PLL trying to follow the clock. The FIFO solution is much more involved than TP Cronus solution, but without the ability to slave the MCStreamer not much else can be done.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.