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In: Audio, Computer
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After many years messing around with digital audio, I’m confident to have found the perfect setup. But it’s not an easy setup. The thing is, digital audio is not easy. In the analog world, you connect some equipment and then turn up the volume and put your ear next to the speaker. Hum, noise? Too much? Left and right the same? Depending on volume setting? All easy measurements we have made for decades. Let’s “Fourier Transform” these measurements and start listening for … jitter? harsh sounding music? I bought this beautiful piece of mechanical engineering from Technics some time ago. It’s called a turntable. AddedRead More →

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In: Amateur Radio, Audio, Computer
With: 3 Comments

“Do I have to change any settings on my IC-7300 for use with RS-BA1 ?” is an interesting question. My first answer is: “Why would you..”. After reading the comments from others to this question, I decided to write this blog post. First of all, try to understand the Icom wording and terminology. Don’t draw your own conclusions. The most famous example is Icom’s usage of the word REMOTE… “Do I have to change any settings on my IC-7300 for use with RS-BA1 ?” can be answered with no. This implies that: USB is linked to REMOTE, resulting in 19200 maximum baud rate, resulting inRead More →

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In: Audio, Computer
With: 4 Comments

The Apple Airport Express (AE) is a beautiful device. One of its functions is the ability to act as audio Airplay receiver. Airplay is a streaming protocol, based on a lossless 44.1KHz/16 bit stereo audio stream. It’s part of iTunes since a long time. It uses Bonjour for service advertisement and as such is zero conf. My Airport Express is the 2nd gen model with 802.11n (update: The A1264 model). All models have a combined analog optical output. Many years ago I used it with an Apogee Minidac and the results were very good. One year ago I connected everything again and was disappointed withRead More →

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The Apogee MiniDAC is a wonderful converter. But how does it work? Well, first of all, you can’t download the schematics from the net. So how it exactly works I don’t know. But looking at the components inside reveals at least some info. Therefor my guess is as follows: 1. Two times CS8416 input digital receiver/PLL chip. Looking at the number of inputs and print layout, I guess the two units are needed because of the number of inputs to be switched. 2. Wavefront AL1402, that’s an ADAT receiver chip which decodes the 8 channel (optical) ADAT stream into 4 stereo pairs. 3. Xilink Spartan XC2S50Read More →