On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 19:56 -0400, Dave Robillard wrote: > Agreed. "We" don't need a bunch of useless consumer cruft on a card. > However channels are good, don't downplay channels :). This thing > should have as many channels as possible. Obviously there is a physical > limit to how many you can cram in physically, but that's what lightpipe > is for. There's many 8x8 rackmount preamps out there you could hook up > (including a nice and cheap one from Behringer) > > Frankly I think 60+ channels is completely unrealistic (otherwise one > would probably exist), but what do I know. If it's possible, hell yes > put them in there. > > FWIW, my ideal audio interface _requires_: > > * As many channels as possible > * At least 1 ADAT Lightpipe in/out > * Clock sync > * Balanced everything > * Real 19" rackmount breakout box > * Good low latency operation (in Linux w/ Jack)
I think after reading the comments in this thread that you may have a hard time finding a niche. There are already devices on the market with good GPL drivers that do all this - the appeal of the open graphics project was that there were no good graphics cards with GPL drivers. That leaves the options of competing on price/quality with the likes of RME and M-Audio, or a DSP device, which although I think it's a cool idea, there's a lot of resistance to it. I don't think your feature set is necessarily "consumer stuff", it's just that most such devices to date (Creative) have kind of been crap. Lately however Creative/EMU's DSP cards have been getting great reviews (X-Fi, EMU 1212M, etc) - they seem to have fixed a lot of the common complaints about the SBLive! based devices (crappy codecs, horrible resampling). And they are still damn cheap ($200-300 tops IIRC) but have no Linux drivers. This might be an area to investigate, but I suspect you would need years of development to produce a device of that quality for anywhere near Creative's price point. Lee
