Sure - its a great idea to make your own I agree. I simply dont have time at the moment as I am busy with other projects - but I would certainly invest in a system made by someone here if its timing was solid. For me at the moment the cheapest way of doing 32 channels or more is with RME Raydats daisy chained (for more than 32 channels) with Behringer ADAT converters (about euro 150 each). Then Motu do a 24 output soundcard that can be daisychained - Ive seen them on sale for £150 on gumtree - they also have rock solid timing and nice Dacs. If you or anyone else has builds something let me know - Id be very interested !
On 12 April 2014 23:02, Sampo Syreeni <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2014-04-12, Augustine Leudar wrote: > > the use I have in mind is not really anything to do with ambisonics - >> rather I just want a reasonbly good quality 8 channel soundcard to run an >> eight channel sound installation on . >> > > Yeah, but still, even if not every sound encoding system requires perfect > coherence between channels, at least ambisonic does. Once you have full > synchronization between channels, it doesn't hurt except in the cost it > adds, when you do things like 5.1 where the channels do not need to be > quite so well registered with each other. But it then it certainly helps if > you need to do work which requires coherence, like ambisonic, WFS, > beamforming, direction finding and the rest of the basically > interferometric lot. > > So what I was thinking about was, how low could you really go in cost if > you wanted to to optimize like that. Keeping to a fully coherent A/D/A > architecture, and then scale to the maximum number of channels without e.g. > needing an external power source. Based on what I know of the current > circuit economy and the common use cases, you could go pretty far. Quite > certainly something like third order==sixteen channels wouldn't be out of > reach, an using standard, proven chips I find it rather difficult to > believe the eventual value of the converter should have to exceed something > like 100€. It'd take some doing, yeah, good enough, synchronizable quad > converter chips do exist, with built-in USB and/or Ethernet capability. Not > to mention that a Raspberry Pi already costs just low tens of euros, and > the economy of even ASICs nowadays. > > What I mean is, while there's nothing out there in the cost bracket you > and everybody else on this list wants, I really see no reason why there > couldn't be. To me it seems like a problem with consumer demand: your > typical home theatre enthusiast couldn't possibly afford all of the > speakers, amplifiers and or listening rooms even sixteen channels worth of > conversion capability requires, so they don't want these kinds of > multichannel converters. Hence, such converters aren't made in bulk at all. > But the production cost of making something like that even starting from > zero really shouldn't be much above that of an USB, stereo converter > package which we do have and which cost next to nothing. > > Thus, why *not* make one of our own? It's not rocket surgery after all. > Not today. And there are even a few academics on-list with ties to > electrical engineering departments, so that the design cost of a converter > package suitable for audio research work might be almost negligible, too. > Thrown into the free and open domain, a well-thought out package like that > could easily become a landmark piece in open hardware, it'd make all of our > lives much easier and less costly in the still-experimental high > multichannel space, and you might even be able to get a couple of > PhD's/EE's out of it and/or its applications. Spin out a couple of startups > in a startup-poor economy, and what not. What's not to like there? ;) > > -- > Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - [email protected], http://decoy.iki.fi/front > +358-40-3255353, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 > _______________________________________________ > Sursound mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound > -- 07812675974 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20140415/1eeb5298/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
