The Raspberry PI route is interesting and relatively cheap. There are now 8-channel "hats" like this one: http://www.suptronics.com/miniPCkits/x6000-8.0ch.html and there's even one board with a 4x100W amp in the making. Check all boards: http://www.suptronics.com/boards.html I love my $30 X400 hat with the integrated speaker and headphone amps.
But a 24-channel RPI based solution would be much more difficult to integrate and would still cost over $400, which is about the same price than the uTrack24 (but only in Europe where it's sold for 375 euros; in the US it's $999, go figure). Then, there's the problem of building a custom Linux system for the task of playing audio (and doing tax returns). Then the required logic to synchronize 2 or more RPIs must be added. Also, the RPI takes at least a minute to boot from an unreliable SD card. It'd be fun, but a bit risky. One possibility is to add 2 USB sound modules to the RPI, synchronizing them to the 8-channel hat using the zita-ajbridge software, but I doubt that a SD card can provide enough bandwidth for 24 channels of uncompressed audio, even at 16bit/44.1Khz. So I still believe that for a reliable computer based solution, a single PC computer would be easier and safer. Also, the PC platform is mature, and a well defined method can survive PC hardware upgrades. -- Marc On Wed, 28 Jun 2017 14:51:09 +0300 (EEST) Sampo Syreeni <de...@iki.fi> wrote: > But if I *didn't* miss anything, I believe what you're after is > simply a high number of well synched channels, at a reasonable price > point. You want to get 22 of them right? Possibly more? You want them > to be child and bomb proof, too, right? > > You can't get that kind of hardware in over seven channels. You can't > get it compactly in over for, or perhaps six. Even then the stuff > will take the form of developer boards or SoC based hacker boards > such as the Pi. > > So, you're going to have to do some integration work in any case for > channel counts as high as you're asking for. My favourite would be > something like a Raspberry Pi for each eight channels, stacking the > D/A converters on top on 2x4 daughterboards. That'd buy you 8 > channels per board, with ample processing power and Ethernet > connectivity to spare. You could even push it as far as three > daughter boards, so 12 channels per motherboard, and you still > wouldn't saturate either of the USB or the Ethernet port. But you be > pushing the processor quite a lot already, if you did any substantial > processing, such as well-resampled fractional sample delay correction > which I suggested above. -- Marc _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
