erland wrote: > > My personal feeling is that if you want this to be something more than a > geek board with totally 50-100 audiophile users, HDMI, built-in DAC and > excellent S/PDIF is more important than support for USB DAC's. Skipping > or risking USB DAC support can result in that you loose some audiophile > users, skipping HDMI is going to decrease potential users a lot more. I > would not sacrifice everything else just to get ehci on the USB, but I > don't have a USB DAC at the moment. >
Erland, I agree that HDMI on the GEN2 is a must as well. Not because I personally would ever use it, but because stand-alone hi-fi systems are getting to be a bit of a rarity now, but everyone has a TV with a a pair of speakers built-in and HDMI port. So of course, it has to cater for the mainstream. That I would not choose to listen to music that way is up to me. Having said that, our primary goal should be audio and not visual. If I wanted to push this from an audiophool point of view, I'd be talking about the on-board DAC design...... you need a FIFO, followed by a re-clocker, followed by an FPGA for OS/DF duty, and you can't skimp on the DAC chip, I'd prefer you to stay away from sigma-delta but if you or going to go that way, then it must be Sabre, but would much prefer your FPGA followed by 4x PCM1704 (which would boost the price by $300) so the audiophool's can have balanced output. ;) But my gut feeling is that JS, whatever he chooses to do, it will be superb value for money and will not sacrifice sound quality, so there is no need to drive the price up by making audiophile requests on that front. There are now plenty of USB DAC's around that are UAC2. It is not only the high, high, high-end. I don't believe a bullet-proof UAC2 out to just be a nod to the audiophool. It is mainstream. A few years ago, definitely not. But now it is. There would be an expectation that any computer related audio device which offers a USB host port would support UAC2 devices. In the same way as if you offer a SPDIF out, it should be low jitter, if you have a USB port it should play music without issues and "artifacts". For the sake of future-proofing I see it as a necessity. Whatever happens with USB3, who cares.... Thunderbolt, again, who cares.... In terms of any connectivity out that is offered by the device, I see UAC2 as a must. Providing a super, super, super, very low jitter SPDIF out is mostly a nod to the past and supporting users who don't have UAC2 capability. The mainstream hi-fi press has seen to it that SPDIF is now considered by many a second-class choice to asynch USB, (whether that is true or not and I don't believe it is, is irrelevant), that's the way it is and the way it is going to be going forward. Whatever is produced by this project needs to at least target the now, not just the past, IMHO. UAC2 is mainstream. Yes, I might have one foot in the audiophool camp, but I know plenty of people who have UAC2 USB DAC, that I wouldn't consider to be high-end, certainly not in terms of price, that play aac and mp3 through them, and being non-geeky would have the expectation that they would work as well with this device as they do plugged into their laptop. Whether those people would actually buy this device, I cannot say. At the end of the day I guess we are going to differ. I see UAC2 being a core requirement and as important as SPDIF or HDMI connectivity, or the on-board DAC. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JackOfAll's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3069 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97881 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
