On 2014-04-13, Ross Bencina wrote:
I am ignorant of the economics, but perhaps it is worth considering an
FPGA-based implementation:
"An FPGA-based Re-configurable 24-bit 96kHz Sigma-Delta Audio DAC"
Ray C.C. Cheung et al.
Worth a look because I'm not *too* well educated about the economics
either, but my hunch is, that'd prove costly overkill. 1-4 channel high
quality converters are already available as bulk product, at very low
cost (to the tune of well under a buck per channel). What you really
need after that is just the interface and synch circuitry, and whatever
you need on the analog side for its interfaces, noise-free reference
voltages, stable, low-jitter clocking and whatnot. Something like that
doesn't take high end components like tightly integrated FPGA's and
their support circuitry, but at most tightly integrated opamps, fuze
programmable PAL/GAL/CPLD, and the ilk.
Of course the rationale is much the same as with FPGA's -- the chip
types I mentioned are basically just the smaller brothers of FPGA after
all -- but the price point is much, *much* lower, in concordance with
the lesser amount of stuff you have to implement yourself once the
basic, hardest D/A stuff and even most of the interface logic was
already bought in bulk, and since in this sort of an application, you
really don't require reprogrammability (which takes at least an order of
magnitude away from the cost).
Now, this is obviously just another one of my wild ideas. It's highly
unlikely I would be in the position to try it out, at least any time
soon. There's still a rather hefty base investment when you do something
like this. But sorta, kinda, I believe the basic economics ought to pan
out; I don't think even ridiculous channel counts are mainly hard today
because of the cost of production, but because of the low demand and the
amortization problems it causes. If so, something like this would be one
helluva match with circuit design class projects, Kickstarter-like nerdy
crowdfunding, or the kind of hobbyist/researcher ecosystem we have even
on this list.
--
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front
+358-40-3255353, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
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