Svart box prototype has landed.

ah that's sweet; you've grown so close in such a short time; it must be love !

I can feel the love

seriously John do you have any sense of perhaps preferring working with one sound or the other svart box or burl ?

Chuck is a great guy to have do a comparison svart, he's totally competent, he's got real nice gear, is a wicked musician who was nominated for a pair of Grammys in 2015(string arranging), has a YouTube channel and followers, IMO it could help the svart box visibilility if it compares favorably to his symphony?

I think Dan had first dibs, but after that...Chuck.

kewl

For the first group it's always been $800 usd for ad and DA that is stated at beginning of the secret thread


I believe svart suggested the price might go up a little for 2-3 batch but I don't know if he has stated to what?

That is a very strong recommendation:sounds like mission accomplished by svart !

Yeah - the DA is probably my favorite part of it...

USB means to actually build a soundcard into the converter, which can complicate things quite a bit. RM and some others do this with the Tenor7022 USB streaming controller AFAIK, which provides a class compliant interface that needs no driver development. This said, i hear a difference e.g. in the RM superbeast, depending on driving it from the Motu AVB or Profire Lightbridge or from his own USB soundcard.
I prefer the dedicated soundcards mostly. It is not too different, but still noticable.

As far as i understood, the svartbox is all about clean concept and uncompromised sound quality, a very good stereo converter with good build quality at a very affordable pricing.
If i would be into buying a main stereo recording AD and high quality monitoring DA or similar tasks, i would be in without a second thought.
My brother and me discussed it even despite the fact that we have enough converters at good quality right now already. (Mytek and RM for recording/monitoring and Motu AVB for console feed and as soundcard)
Electrical SPDIF to TOSlink lightpipe SPDIF converters and vice versa are as simple as it gets from circuitry, are very cheap (to build) and widely available in different build qualities from different manufacturers if needed...
Sure, these features build in would be convenient, but maybe svart comes up with a hyper-svartbox after doing a few batches of his first one.... Who knows...?

There are USB chips available that use PCM or I2S audio streams to/from the AD/DA chips, and allow you to have USB streaming to the computer.  USB is non-linear in it's timing.  The audio stream you get from USB is not a straight stream, but bursts of data that are collected and fed into your system as the OS sees fit to do so (IRQ/interrupts, etc).  I figured that SPDIF was not only easier to implement, but by nature is a linear stream.  It might see interrupting at the OS level, but it usually is handled by a sound subsystem/driver first, so it has the possibility of being less molested.

I haven't investigated the USB chips yet, as I needed to get something done and out to the public, but I will in the future if this box sells enough to fund future designs.

Anyway, if I integrated all the things that people have asked for in the threads and via PM, I would still be working on this thing until the end of next year!

Seriously though, I got rushed with all kinds of "I can't buy it unless it has ________ feature" messages when I first started this project.  It was daunting to know that there were dozens of folks demanding certain features and to know that I might lose customers, but the scope of the project was originally to deliver something comparable to the RM products in a more reasonable timeframe.  I expanded the project a little after some convincing, but I tried to keep it simple enough to actually deliver something reasonably fast and at a decent pricepoint.

It was then that I decided that I'm making a converter box, NOT an interface.  That's why I ended up leaving a handful of "features" off. I'll leave it up to the customer to figure out how they want to use it and if it's right for them.

As for SPDIF COAX vs. SPDIF optical, I've seen way more devices using SPDIF coax over the years, than SPDIF optical.  Most of my digital gear has SPDIF COAX.  My TV/CD player/Stereo system is SPDIF coax, my JBL digital monitors are SPDIF coax, my soundcard is SPDIF coax, etc.  Doing some research online I found that most everything that mentions SPDIF has a coax connection along with an optical one.  I made the decision to use the one I felt was more prevalent. 

Besides, you can get cheap SPDIF converters:

COAX to optical for the AD output: 
www.monoprice.com/Product?p_id=2947&kpid=102947&gclid=CIfa7qT2vsUCFYwdgQodLoMAmg

Optical to COAX for the DA input:
www.monoprice.com/Product?p_id=2948&catargetid=320013720000066114&cadevice=c&kpid=102948&gclid=COvY5qX2vsUCFZIdgQod7kYAEQ

And I'll mention it again, SPDIF and AES3 are almost the same thing.  There is a slight voltage difference between the two, but most SPDIF/AES3 receiver/transmitter chips are capable of accepting either one.  SPDIF is simply the consumer version of AES3 and has a few more bits in the stream used for copy protection and such.

So, while I will sell the unit as SPDIF I/O, you can also most likely use a single-ended AES signal as the digital source/receiver too.