DSD USB AUDIO 2.0 MULTICHANNEL REFERENCE DESIGN

[Ross]

Hi Ross,

How is the development going?

8 months have passed since you informed me about the development of the multichannel DSD addon for the xCORE USB sliceKIT (https://www.xmos.com/products/xkits/slicekit).

When will the new "slice" for multichannel DSD be released? I would like to buy this board ASAP.

I'm looking forward to your reply!

Kind regards

Hi, they are real and do exist - I will try and find out what the hold up with the release of the hardware into distribution is. As you know the software has been available for quite a while.

[Guho]

That is great news Ross !

I'm looking forward to your next message / the technical specifications of the board/slice and of course the availability.

Thanks in advance.

[Ross]

I told something should be available to purchase in 4-6 weeks.

[Mivera]

Hi Ross,

We are also interested in the exact same thing. Has this been released yet? It's been 4.5 months since your post saying it will be released in 4-6 weeks. But I can't find any info about it on your website.

Thanks

[infiniteimprobability]

It's all released and available - please check here for proof! - http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail ... ND/5052031

Also, with regards to running DSD on this kit, take a look at this info too:

http://www.xcore.com/questions/3052/dsd ... -audio-kit

[Mivera]

Thank you for the reply.

I have read everything there is about this kit but I'm still not sure if it's capable of DSD 256 or DSD 512 on 8 channels.

I'm also aware that there is more powerful chips available now The Xcore-200.

https://www.xmos.com/support/boards?pro ... 4&secure=1

Since the chip on this board has twice the processing power, wouldn't that be the way to go? We are looking for DSD 256 or better yet 512 over 8+channels. We are using our own DAC's which are capable of DSD 512, so the capabilities of the onboard dac doesn't matter to us.

I also noticed that there is even more powerful 4000mips chips available as well.

http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xc ... /xe-series

One of them should surely be capable of DSD 512 over 8+ channels?

I can imagine at some point the bandwidth of USB 2.0 will be the bottleneck. Do you happen to know how many channels of DSD 512 can be supported before either your most powerful chip's processing power max out, or the USB 2.0 maxes out?


Thanks in advance

[Ross]

Hi Ross,

We are also interested in the exact same thing. Has this been released yet? It's been 4.5 months since your post saying it will be released in 4-6 weeks. But I can't find any info about it on your website.

Thanks

It's listed here: http://www.xmos.com/products/boards#usb ... ltichannel

[Ross]

Thank you for the reply.

I have read everything there is about this kit but I'm still not sure if it's capable of DSD 256 or DSD 512 on 8 channels.

I'm also aware that there is more powerful chips available now The Xcore-200.

https://www.xmos.com/support/boards?pro ... 4&secure=1

Since the chip on this board has twice the processing power, wouldn't that be the way to go? We are looking for DSD 256 or better yet 512 over 8+channels. We are using our own DAC's which are capable of DSD 512, so the capabilities of the onboard dac doesn't matter to us.

I also noticed that there is even more powerful 4000mips chips available as well.

http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xc ... /xe-series

One of them should surely be capable of DSD 512 over 8+ channels?

I can imagine at some point the bandwidth of USB 2.0 will be the bottleneck. Do you happen to know how many channels of DSD 512 can be supported before either your most powerful chip's processing power max out, or the USB 2.0 maxes out?

I also noticed that the Xcore-200 chips also have Ethernet versions. In situations where the bandwidth would exceed that of USB 2.0, could the Ethernet chips be used?

We are not just looking for a development board, we are looking to create a multichannel USB or ethernet to multichannel DSD 256 or 512 interface. We are not experts on building these boards but we know people who are.

But if one of the development boards are capable of DSD 256 or 512 over 8+ channels we would like to buy one to play with. And we would like the most powerful unit.

Another question I have is with the Ethernet chips, can several of them be linked together on a network and be in perfect sync? If so what will the max capabilities be for channel count and DSD rate?

Our ultimate goal is to have 7 cards each outputting 4 channels of DSD 512 linked together on a perfectly synced network.

Thanks in advance

The DAC on that board (CS4384) is 8 channel but only spec'd to DSD128.

DSD64 over DoP has an equivalent PCM rate of 176.4kHz Multiply that by 8 for DSD512 gives an effective PCM rate of 1411.2kHz.

This means you need to transfer 177 samples per USB microframes per channel. So multiply that by 4 bytes persample then 8 channels gives over 5000 bytes - way over the standard USB packet size of 1024bytes, and even higher than a "high bandwidth endpoint" that can transfer 3 x 1024byte per microframe. Therefore DoP not within spec.

We have a our native DSD implementation that uses half the data-rate, which would fit in a high b/w EP but thats still a massive amount of data..

[Mivera]

Thanks Ross. I'll take my additional questions to the Q&A area.