• These commercial threads are for private transactions. diyAudio.com provides these forums for the convenience of our members, but makes no warranty nor assumes any responsibility. We do not vet any members, use of this facility is at your own risk. Customers can post any issues in those threads as long as it is done in a civil manner. All diyAudio rules about conduct apply and will be enforced.

Hi-end DSP based multi-channel integrated Preamp/Crossover/DAC project

David,

Absolutely great design! I've been looking at various equivalent ones;

miniSharc + Buffalo III + I/V stages (complicated set ups, lack of FIR taps)
miniSharc + miniDAC8 (no balanced output, lack of FIR taps)
Najda (no balanced output, no mixed FIR + IIR)

They're short of my needs - full balanced input / output, mix of FIR and IIR.

I also look at Motu 24Ao with Jriver / HTPC, which can handle 24 channels of audio through USB and 3 sets of ES9018 DACs. This gives most flexibility in terms of DSP processing and channel counts - 64 maximum with multiple units.

However, I still prefer a standalone crossover like yours. Please sign me up for the first release. At this point, I am reluctant to buy LX521.4 speakers due to DSP limitation (miniDSP 4x10HD).
 
David,

Absolutely great design! I've been looking at various equivalent ones;

miniSharc + Buffalo III + I/V stages (complicated set ups, lack of FIR taps)
miniSharc + miniDAC8 (no balanced output, lack of FIR taps)
Najda (no balanced output, no mixed FIR + IIR)

They're short of my needs - full balanced input / output, mix of FIR and IIR.

I also look at Motu 24Ao with Jriver / HTPC, which can handle 24 channels of audio through USB and 3 sets of ES9018 DACs. This gives most flexibility in terms of DSP processing and channel counts - 64 maximum with multiple units.

However, I still prefer a standalone crossover like yours. Please sign me up for the first release. At this point, I am reluctant to buy LX521.4 speakers due to DSP limitation (miniDSP 4x10HD).

I am in the same boat. Start building the 521 but I am really don't want do 4X10HD if I don't have to. Will rather consider sw solution with Lynx card and DAC of my choice.
 
David,

Absolutely great design! I've been looking at various equivalent ones;

miniSharc + Buffalo III + I/V stages (complicated set ups, lack of FIR taps)
miniSharc + miniDAC8 (no balanced output, lack of FIR taps)
Najda (no balanced output, no mixed FIR + IIR)

They're short of my needs - full balanced input / output, mix of FIR and IIR.

I also look at Motu 24Ao with Jriver / HTPC, which can handle 24 channels of audio through USB and 3 sets of ES9018 DACs. This gives most flexibility in terms of DSP processing and channel counts - 64 maximum with multiple units.

However, I still prefer a standalone crossover like yours. Please sign me up for the first release. At this point, I am reluctant to buy LX521.4 speakers due to DSP limitation (miniDSP 4x10HD).

miniSharc + Buffalo III + I/V stages (complicated set ups, lack of FIR taps)
I know that miniSharc has FIR and IIR can you explain the lack of FIR taps to me?
 
miniSharc + Buffalo III + I/V stages (complicated set ups, lack of FIR taps)
I know that miniSharc has FIR and IIR can you explain the lack of FIR taps to me?

I meant number of FIR taps is not enough to implement, for example, a linear phase crossover at low frequency (<200Hz). Lower sampling frequency (48kHz) helps but is not enough. FIR filter length needs to be in order of wave period.
 
I agree....FIR from end to end is the way to go.
Selecting the right chip is the easy part, implementation is the hard part.

Cheers
D.

If complexity and cost are not an issue, I wish I can have a dedicated DSP per input / output channel. For this case, I takes 10 Sharc chips. 2 Sharcs at input handle room equalization while 8 Sharcs at output take care of crossover and channel / driver equalization.

Paul
 
Well, as long as people are doing focus group consumer feedback, here is my request. Because this is new technology to many of us and the learning curve is pretty steep, it would help if some thought was put into video tutorials and establishing an active users forum. I am frequently humbled by the generosity of fellow hobbyists in sharing knowledge and opinion. Having this all set up ahead of a product launch would hopefully make all this work and the promise of a useful new pre-amp a big hit. Best of luck. Cheers.

PS I think the option to turn off display is important but would not have thought to ask. I keep a roll of black electrical tape around to "dim" LED's. LOL
 
The future is looking bright for the Analog Devices SHARC DSP family. Next generation SHARC+ technology with embedded ARM-CORTEX-A5 core !!

ADSP-SC58x and ADSP-2158x Series | Analog Devices

ADSP-SC58x and ADSP-2158x Series

Multicore SHARC+ARM® SOC Delivers 24GFLOPS Performance at Under 2W for Advanced Real-Time Audio and Industrial Applications
Designed for a Wide Variety of Real-Time Applications

  • Automotive, Consumer and Professional Audio
  • Multi-axis motor control
  • Energy distribution systems
  • and other computationally intensive use cases
 
David,

Are the new devices pin compatible with current generation?

Can a future version of your boards use the newer device with minimal changes?

How about firmware compatibility?

Just looking for thoughts, the new device do sound very nice.

Because it is a BGA package and not QFP so the device is not physically compatible but should be OK software wise. It would require a redesign of the board to use.

cheers
 
Last edited:
Have you got plans to do that or are you going to push on with the current design? It sod be good to see this board reach production, using a new chip would presumably mean delay?

Presumably having an arm processor actually on chip would open up a world of stand-alone devices where with the addition of a little storage the software needed to control the chip could actually be run? In fact I see no reason why a full operating system couldn't be made to run any media or production software that was needed. This could open the door for many exciting products in the future.

Stefan
 
Have you got plans to do that or are you going to push on with the current design? It sod be good to see this board reach production, using a new chip would presumably mean delay?

Presumably having an arm processor actually on chip would open up a world of stand-alone devices where with the addition of a little storage the software needed to control the chip could actually be run? In fact I see no reason why a full operating system couldn't be made to run any media or production software that was needed. This could open the door for many exciting products in the future.

Stefan

Maybe for a future product I may consider it but for now I have more than enough dsp power for the job at hand ;) Also I am not keen on using BGA parts although they are becoming more common place these days especially for high pin count devices like ARM parts.

cheers.
 
One suggestion is to have a capability to link two units as master and slave. This is useful if one board runs out of DSP resource. For example, I can have one identical inputs to master unit and have master handle left XO and slave take care of right XO. I saw many posting on minidsp forum that shows a lot of interest in linking multiple units for various reasons - either more output channels or more FIR taps.

When do you plan to release the board?

Thanks
 
... are not created equal

The future is looking bright for the Analog Devices SHARC DSP family. Next generation SHARC+ technology with embedded ARM-CORTEX-A5 core !!

ADSP-SC58x and ADSP-2158x Series | Analog Devices

Nasty IIR filters are right out of the question for me and as it's just another source of error I'm not a great fan of decimation either. So until these chips get much more powerful Double Precision Floating Point Units, properly usable SIMD Pipelined Vector Processing Instructions and an easily workable software API. In my view it's like choosing a toy when you really need a tool i.e. vaguely similar but one of these just won't do the (64K/128K+ taps x N channels) job.

Maybe a whole bunch of them could do it but then on overall system cost bang per buck will probably still favour the big boys with their own production fabs and well established code base. It's their goal to stay on top of this pile and it looks like they're going to be there for quite some time to come. Not for ever maybe but I'd give it at least another two or three process nodes or say 7 or 8 years before that even looks like changing. Nothing to stop anyone trying the other way though.

In this game without any recognised international standards it's just historical prejudice, hyped up fashion and some vendors wishes to leverage proprietary packaging based on the 'lock-in' profit motivation along with poorly thought through system partitioning that's holding us all back by perpetuating even more confusion. Still; the market(ing?)'s always right donchano: it's the way of the world. But as the customer gets older growing an ever more investment minded perspective the web helps them to get wiser. Spending big bucks just to end up with expensive built in obsolescence looks just so yesterday.

Right now my money's with what the grownups in the pro-space go for. After all that I/O and signal conversion stuff is what they used to make the recordings in the first place. But this could all change if someone found the right mix of hardware and software for the future of audio DSP and Build Your Own Active Systems. Not a trivial undertaking though.

I think you have to have designed and implemented a number of active systems from a variety of technologies before you can say what's missing today and what's really needed in the future. Even if we had exactly that; decently priced and properly proportioned it still might not sell though because not many can be bothered to wade through the appalling complexities, gather the relevant experience and work out precisely what to do about it all. Customers included.

Even if someone did produce the 'missing link' there's no guarantee that any one vendor will get all their ducks in a row so it works well for your next build or the one after that and in a world without any proper standards that's where open systems interoperability steps in to save the day. Only customer 's best interests and system architectural realities and can be allowed to dictate which parameters are used in the multiple constraints satisfaction of optimal functional partitioning. Everything else is just more of the same piled higher and deeper.

For the foreseeable future is something (worth having) for (next to) nothing really on the menu? Ask me again in ten years time and by today's measures the answer may well be yes but by then of course the game will have moved on and all of that costly expensive closed off proprietary kit along with the buyers cash will have gone to live in the big skip in the sky. However, a significant proportion of a purchaser's open systems components may well still be in use.

Earlier if you like?

Or more later maybe?