jdbakker
Well-known member
mainmachine said:Anyone have any thoughts on interfacing these DACs with a PC via firewire?
Nothing that an EE with the relevant experience can't do in a man-month or two. The problem is finding one who will do it for little or no money. As much as I love IEEE1394 it's rather non-trivial, and I don't believe that enough applicable open cores are available to make this a simple matter of plug-and-play.
mainmachine said:Here's an interesting firewire/ FPGA card that might be applicable:
http://www.orsys.de/322c6713.htm
That has only the transceivers (ie: the easy bits, which are simple enough to bolt onto any FPGA).
The idea is that it would communicate via firewire between a pc DAW and the DAC unit.
mainmachine said:It seems like SPI would be more useful than I2S for multi channel use
...why? Apart from the fact that most ADC/DACs don't speak SPI you get more signal edges, more transitions, more noise.
mainmachine said:Anybody else looking into this, or are the majority of people interested in ADAT lightpipe interface?
I am pretty partial to MADI myself, but MADI PC interfaces are rare and expensive. MADI would be much simpler to implement in an FPGA.
I've considered streaming low-latency audio over a (possibly dedicated) Ethernet link. The hardware is doable, of a same level of complexity as MADI, with equal or better performance. The hard bit here is that someone would need to write an ASIO (or similar) driver for it. Under Linux that would be doable, but if you want Windows compatibility (which one? XP? Vista? 7?) it gets pretty hairy pretty fast.
At the end of the day you need to get the data into/out of a DAW, and that tends to limit your options.
JDB.
[ADAT's a bit like McDonalds: nobody over the age of ten is a huge fan but you can get it everywhere]