________________________________ From: Eric Wachsmann [mailto:e...@flex-radio.com] Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 10:15 AM To: Lux, James P Cc: Steve Kallal; Tim Ellison; kl7...@alaska.net; FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz Subject: Re: [Flexradio] First look at the FLEX-3000 production units
Tell me then... Where are the >4 channel 192kHz audio USB devices?? They don't exist because there's no market for them, not because they can't be built. The audio recording business is dominated today by Apples using FireWire, so that's where the products are. Now that Apple is starting to do away with Firewire, I would expect USB to replace it. In the ham software radio business you're depending on leveraging mass produced consumer electronics, so you have to use what's available (e.g. PCs, Windows, 1394, etc.). And it's not just a hardware issue, you're also depending on mass produced consumer windows device drivers. If one manufactured ones own audio interface (with whatever interface), you'd be stuck trying to write high performance real-time streaming drivers for it. Under Windows, that's a non-trivial process (as in many work months of full time effort, assuming you know about windows driver writing in the first place). The fact that people have DPC latency problems is a sign that windows driver writing isn't easy, and that's for commercial products, where presumably they can spread the hundreds of thousands of dollar cost of driver development over many unit sales. For a small product line, it's not worth it. Say it costs $100K to get a good driver written (that's about 3-4 months of a fulltime driver consultant at $150-200/hr). If your sales are 500 units, that driver, alone, costs $200/unit. That kind of cost isn't sustainable except if the product is a ? $5000/each kind of thing. (and strangely enough, if you go out and buy high performance data acquisition or test equipment for $20K from Agilent or NI, it tends to have pretty decent driver support). _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
