[sdiy] Digilent ZED board [was] Re: There is no fun analogue chips anymore!

[Jim Patchell]

There may not be anymore fun analog stuff coming down the pike, but that 
is not true of digital.  Go to the Digilent website 
(http://www.digilentinc.com) and take a look at the ZED board.  On the 
downside, it is going to be pricey.  They show $300 as the accedemic 
priced (I have heard that it will be $500 for regular people.  It 
contains two ARM Cortex A8s besides all of the FPGA fabric.  Wish I 
could get my hands on one of these!

-Jim
On 6/28/2012 7:18 AM, Scott Gravenhorst wrote:
> Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net> wrote:
>> On 28 Jun 2012, at 02:18, KD KD wrote:
>>
>>> And now a "evil whiners" reflection!
>> If I might play devil's advocate for a moment;
>>
>> Why exactly *would* there be any new interesting analog audio chips about?
>>
>> Given the cost of current digital audio solutions, there's really
>> no need. You can get 24-bit 192KHz codecs for less than a beer,
>> and powerful DSPs to go with them for only a couple of beers. The
>> result will do anything your analog chip could manage, and then
>> some. Who except a fool would buy an expensive specialised chip
>> to do something that you could do better with a cheap
>> general-purpose one?
>>
>> Once upon a time, I was a hardcore analogophile and looked down
>> my nose at digital. But that was back in the days when you could
>> still tell the difference. Nowadays, the sampling rates are so
>> high, and the word sizes so large that digital is analog. The LSB
>> is way below the noise floor. On top of that, algorithms have
>> developed enormously and the understanding of the role played by
>> non-linear elements in many analog circuits has improved no end.
>> Judicious use of non-linear elements in digital designs has
>> enabled them to get the same sound as the analog stuff, since now
>> we're copying the limitations too. We're not far away from being
>> able to run Spice sims in realtime and get audio out. How would
>> that be for prototyping?!
>>
>> The really interesting stuff will happen/happens when we go
>> beyond copying old analog gear (virtual analog is tiresome - why
>> do I want a digital oscillator that only has the same three
>> boring waveforms as some junk synth from the seventies?!) and
>> start doing stuff you can only do with digital, but adding in the
>> weird non-linearities and complexity that we've learned from
>> studying the analog stuff. Then we create digital synthesis with
>> character.
>>
>> So forget about not having analog chips and go and do some
>> *really* crazy stuff with DSP instead.
>>
> I have to +1 everything Tom just wrote.  It is the reason I've charged ahead with FPGAs
> doing digital synthesis.  The digital domain does approach analog as word size and
> sample rate increases in the same sense of a calculus limit.  I remember reading early
> digital synthesis papers where the sample rates of 20 kilohertz were quoted because the
> engines available then operated in the low megahertz.  In my opinion, we're at a point
> where while there is a difference, it can be imperceptible unless you want to
> intentionally do lowfi.  Polyphony is another reason.  Making a high quality polysynth
> out of consumer analog parts is expensive, large and heavy and can't even come close to
> the voice count nor the voice complexity of digital.  Not to mention tuning, amplitude
> consistency, and even timbre consistency.  And I whole heartedly agree about digital
> modeling of analog systems.  It's a good exercise, but we've been there and done that
> and I think everyone here will agree that what we really want is new sounds and new
> approaches to sound generation.
>
> Yes, there is a learning curve bullet to be bitten, but the process is no different
> than the effort we put in to learn how analog systems work.  Once learned, it's part of
> the design palette.
>
> I too would ask why any manufacturer would want to pay engineers to design new and
> better OTAs when the market for them can't possibly ever pay back the engineering cost
> let alone eek out a profit doing it.  Now if someone has an enormous fortune of cash
> and wants to be philanthropic toward the analog effort and make low cost analog ICs for
> a market perhaps only in the hundreds of users, I'd say "knock yourself out".  Any takers?
>
> -- ScottG
> ________________________________________________________________________
> -- Scott Gravenhorst
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