Hi guys, I want in on this! I have been thinking a lot about it over the last few months. I am well accomplished at the hardware design part of this. I'm not sure most of you are aware of this but I do part time consulting for high end hiFi companies wanting to get into digitaal audio, I have lots of hardware experience doing just what this project is about and making it into products for low volume production.
There seems to be an assumption that you need very high volumes to get low prices, this is not really the case. You need high volumes to get REALLY low price, but medium range prices is can be had for fairly low volumes. For example something along the complexity of the Touch main board, can be manufactured for around $125 in 25 quantity, thats board, parts and assembly. That does NOT include the case, full assembly etc, just the board. At 50 quantity you can get down to $100 a board. I have done designs using off the shelf boards and ones that I have done the whole thing from scratch, my current thinking is that for more than a couple systems it actually winds up being cheaper to do the whole thing from scratch, that way you get EXACTLY what you want. When using an off the shelf board you have to try and shoehorn your design into sombody elses vision, which rarely matches yours exactly. For example, some people around here have mentioned things like IR remotes, if your chosen existing board doesn't have the capability, you either live without it or you have to add a board that does it, and figure out how to connect that into some port on the existing board. When you do the whole thing yourself it is MUCH easier to add things like that directly to the main board. When doing it yourself you have a wide range of options available for including in the device, that would be very difficult to add to an existing board. For example as has been mentioned having FPGA based filters is something that is easy to add to our own board, and adds very little cost. I can easily put in a VERY high quality S/PDIF interface that will be better than just about anything out there, or even a USB output optimized for audio use. I have been doing systems like these for many years now and the biggest time sinc has always been the UI. Since the SB line already has good external UI options, I think it makes more sense to design a product to be a black box (but with a web server for configuration etc so you get away from the Duet problems). Having a display and interface along the lines of the Touch seems to me to double or tripple the complexity of the project. I'm a little torn on one aspect of this, my passion is for very high quality DACs, having done systems similar to this several times I CAN say that I can do a better job for less money building very good DACs into the project than you can get by buying external DACs. It doesn't HAVE to be an either or. I can do a two board system, one board has the main guts and digital audio interfaces (S/PDIF USB) and another board that plugs in which has the DACs (it does NOT connect to the S/PDIF or USB). So if you want to spend the extra $400 you can get audio quality that will out perform external DACs costing many thousands. It is just so much easier to do a really good job of a DAC if you can build it into the architecture of the main system. Things I am NOT good at: industrial design, please don't ask me to design a really good looking case for this! John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97881 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
