There's this interesting product I came across: an evaluation board from Wolfson Micro for the WM8804 high-performance SPDIF transmitter: http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/news/258 . This might be an interesting way to upgrade older soundcards (e.g upgrading 10 year old ICE1712 designs w/ modern DACs & reduced jitter while still retaining stable snd-ice1712 drivers) or digital synthesizers and other A/V equipment to give older perfectly serviceable equipment the latest D/A's and an improved output section. http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/products/WM8804 http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/uploads/documents/en/WM8804EV1M_Configurations.pdf http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/uploads/documents/en/WM8804_Schematic%20and%20Layout.pdf Lots of potentially useful applications with this evaluation board, all ready to go: * optical/coax --> spdif with de-jitter. * i2s --> spdif with de-jitter * resync incoming i2s stream w/ external spdif clock * USB control (?) * onboard monitoring via WM8726 high performance stereo DAC up to 24bit/192k, w/ hardware selection of data interface format, mute, de-emphasis, justification, etc. (which should make it easy to work with or emulate existing computer soundcard DAC's that one might want to update to the latest technology). I'd like to hear people's opinions on whether this is a useful or good product to invest time into? Specification-wise, the de-jittering capability looks impressive, appears to better some of the competing products "on paper." All of which might make the $200.00 pricetag (for the evaluation board, not the chip itself) palatable (I've called the local distributor for samples). Once proven, such a circuit could be constructed for far less than $200 cost of the evaluation board. The WM8804 itself is pretty cheap and fairly self-contained, and so is the included DAC.... Then again, so is http://cgi.ebay.com/24bit-192KHz-DAC-DIY-KIT-FULL-ASSEMBLED-KIT-PCM1798-/330444818304 or http://cgi.ebay.com/HIgh-End-CD-Player-DAC-Upgrade-Mod-Kit-BB-PCM67U-DAC-AE-/230418195291 versus http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Wolfson-Microelectronics/WM8804-6152-DS20-EV1/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMvMXbh32ZmHABhefv%252bfyptd WM8804-6152-DS20-EV1 Manufacturer: Wolfson Microelectronics Description: Audio Modules & Development Tools WM8804 Eval Board ........ The WM8804 is a high performance S/PDIF transceiver which offers a state-of-the-art jitter attenuating S/PDIF receiver design. The WM8804 customer evaluation board provides full functionality for the evaluation of the WM8804 device. ... Software to configure the evaluation board can be downloaded from http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/support/drivers (unfortunately, all the drivers SW is for Windows, and http://opensource.wolfsonmicro.com/ doesn't mention the 8804...). .... Niels http://nielsmayer.com _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
