Krisbee wrote: > I suppose I was just curious as to where the Cubietruck might lead to.
It's not so much that it leads to anywhere, more that it gives options. The CT has appeal to the DIY crowd. I2S out, (with a soldering iron), we already discussed. But I also see it having appeal to the totally non-DIY'er. eg. to add a SATA drive to the WB Quad, you need to deal with the powersupply for it. Splice into the 5V before it gets to the barrel connector, etc. etc. wheras the CT has a 5V header for the drive on the board. So it is plug and play for someone who doesn't want to do even the most basic DIY. Then, it doesn't need an external wi-fi aerial. Save a few bucks there. It comes with a basic plexi "case". (If you can call it a case. ;)) Then there is the nice Ewell case available, that takes the CT board plus SATA drive and exposes every connector and button on the outside of the case. (WB, you can't get to the reset button once you have it in the case.) Then it has the VGA port. Which not everyone would want to use, but I have already had one request, (which was more an ask for advice), "I have an old monitor with only a VGA input" that I'd like to connect. Then, with the farce as it is at the moment that the WB Quad seems forever out of stock and the chances that you'll get a working SPDIF out of the Dual carrier board, being virtually zero, it solves that problem. By a price/perfomance yardstick, especially if you want the SATA port, it is better value than the WB Quad. And price is something that I'm getting a lot of negative feedback on. That we've picked the most expensive board mass produced ARM board as our chosen one. A WB Dual and John's board puts us above 300 GBP. You can buy a Pi for 30 quid or so and there are multiple DAC boards now, starting at 20 quid. There is a whole subject there, price/performance/value. Which I'll post some more thought out recommendations when the 3x F20 images are available. I think the CT is a nice board. Enought processor horsepower for upsampling and running the server. 2GB of RAM, same as the WB Quad. HDMI audio out works. SPDIF (TOSLINK) audio out works. God only knows how or why it can be so, (and some things are better left unexplained), but the CT uses the audio codec built into the Allwinner SOC for analogue out, many other designs use an external codec chip. Unlike the sgtl5000 analogue out of the WB, it is much higher quality. I've had the chance to back-to-back compare it to the Touch. All I need to say is that I could listen to it all day long, but I couldn't stand to listen to the WB analogue out for more than 10 mins. The only downside, being that it won't support the JS hardware. But for many that already have a decent USB DAC and have no intention of every using the JS hardware, I think it is a better buy than either the WB Dual or Quad, if you want to run LMS on it and connect an external DAC. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JackOfAll's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3069 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=99395 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
