Audio converter buyer list

welcome to the forum man, svart(chris) does electronic engineering work for a living, designing gear with bandwidths and complexity that far exceeds anything an audio converter does, so these kinds of converters are actually below his pay grade from what i understand, there is no doubt they will be everything we'd expect sound wise as compared to the Ross Martin superbeast stuff, it's got top of the line single op amps and power supply's per card, and the best converter chips available paired and used in single channel implementation, the spec sheet will read as good as the best stuff out there bar none.  My confident guess is the workmanship and elegance of layout and case will be about as good as it gets.

Prob in the for ADC, how do you get on the list?

Not a hard date, but maybe 6-8 weeks from right now barring significant issues and day job requirements.

I have the ADC boards coming next week at some point.  I need to see the quality of the pcb and then I order enough parts for 10 boards.

I have about 75% of the DAC board layout done.  Since I learned a bunch about placement and fitment issues on the ADC board prototypes, I will likely go straight to a production quantity with these after going through my checklist of issues.  

It takes about two weeks to get the boards once ordered.

I made a bunch of progress on the chassis planning.  I need to start drawing the design in CAD.  I still have to decide whether to have the chassis made by someone else or if I can take on making chassis.  I have a person looking into doing silkscreening for these on the chance that I take on the chassis work.

I also need to finish up the code.  The majority of it is working, but I have some issues with getting the setting arrays working.  This is simply a learning curve thing and I should be able to get through it pretty quickly I think.

Also working up a plan for automated testing of units.  Since RM seems to have a large amount of units failing or not working when delivered, I'm going to implement a standard "burn in" and final production test so that the units are turned on and run for a couple days and then tested to make sure they are still working.

I think that's about it for now.

Unfortunately no. The boards are too wide to fit 3 wide in a 1u chassis, And since the scope of the design was only a stereo ad/da, i don't have extra provisions for chaining them internally.

I could probably do a 2u with 4 boards acting as two separate systems, but the issue there is that SPDIF/AES is only stereo. You'd need separate i/o for the two systems. Maybe someone makes a 4 channel interface, i dunno.

You did by posting in this thread.

The first batches will be smaller since I'm fronting the design and build costs out of my pocket. After the first couple batches of ten, I should have cash enough to buil much larger batches and keep stock on hand so there will be no more lists.

I think most of this has been answered in earlier posts and by the helpful folks on the forum.

However, i do want to clarify something.

None of those converters you listed are "mastering quality". If you want true mastering quality, you have to get a Weiss, Lavry, Forssell ,etc level converter which are designed for that specific purpose in mind. Anything else is just marketing speak.

The "mastering" quality description of the ICs i am using was added by a user describing their purchase. It is not one I added to my product and i aim to keep expectations grounded in reality.

I'm designing a solid converter using chips and parts that have been chosen by lots of other people as their favorites for many reasons. I have a background in designing cost effective solutions that work as intended and should last a long time.

I also believe this design will perform as good or better than many other converter systems that cost more money, and I am designing these with that belief driving my decisions.

I will leave the marketing terms like "mastering quality" to others to use if they decide my product exceeds their expectations.

What makes the "Weiss, Lavry, Forssell" mastering grade while this isn't? Just curious what's in their special sauce.

At least in my mind, it's the mindset behind the design.  Those are specifically designed with that in mind.  

As far as the designs themselves are concerned, they typically spare no expense on anything.  My design attempts to make as best a compromise as possible between price and performance.

Those guys do things like fully discrete audio and power paths, discrete single bit-by-bit conversion, etc.  Oven compensated super clocking, etc.

There is absolutely a reason they cost so much, and why the top mastering engineers use them and not those other, cheaper, boxes.

Whether or not a mastering engineer ends up using my box is not a design-driving concern for me.  If they do, I'll be glad for it, but I'm not going to pretend my design is anywhere as awesome as a Lavry gold.  As an engineer I'd be happy to even be mentioned in the same sentence when being compared to someone like Lavry or Weiss though.

Anyway, I'm not going to lie. I'm not doing a whole lot of R&D for this at all.  I'm essentially taking chips and making them work together.  I'm not inventing my own discrete single-bit converter.

All you need is a format converter like the old Alesis AI4 to get 4 stereo aes/spdif boxes to interface light pipe for 8 I/o of these. You can even combine with other boxes for versatility.

The Lynx aurora can function this way as well, piping any combination of up to 4 stereo I/o into a single light pipe.

Yes, all I need is a format converter, why doesn't anybody make a simple one like the Alesis AI4?  I don't particularly want to buy a box that hasn't been in production for so long.  Judging by the number of comments on the other site, I think there is quite a market for an AI4-type box, and absolutely no competition being manufactured today that I can find, with the exception of the very expensive RME products.

You can pick up old RME products for a song. I got a 1st gen multiface w/PCI card for 225 of evilbay

It would probably be AES/SPDIF in/out and ADAT in/out for sure, and I could probably look into pulling off the WC somewhere in there and have WC out for those who want it.  Maybe I could add other features too.  It's a little early to say, but I'll think about it.