[sdiy] Hardware convolution box?

Frédéric (Opensource) marzacdev at gmail.com
Mon Feb 13 17:34:11 CET 2017


Hi everyone,

I see you discussing this topic (the convolution box) for quite
a while now, but my stupid and naive question is, what do you
need this system for?

I mean, is it only for reverb or rooms simulations?
Or do you want to model some amps or other gear (like the
Kemper Profiling thing does)?

Because I personally see convolution approaches as very
inefficient methods (in terms of computing resources) when it
comes  to model a certain system response.

Musically,
Frédéric

PS: Not trolling the list, just curious.


Le 13/02/2017 à 17:18, cheater00 cheater00 a écrit :
>
> Hi Bruno,
> TBH for a single instrument you don't need amazing adc or dac, but 
> there are lots of i2s adc and dac boards out there geared for hifi 
> enthusiasts. Some are cheap, and work well. Some are great quality, 
> and you can spend as much as you want, really.
>
>
> On Mon, 13 Feb 2017 17:03 Bruno Afonso, <bafonso at gmail.com 
> <mailto:bafonso at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Here are some random thoughts. Unless things have changed or are
>     different with higher end sharc dev boards, I'm not sure you will
>     get audio ins and outs that are acceptable for musicians,
>     especially after you've gone through all the trouble to be able to
>     use long and well made IRs, ie, think of nice reverbs where tails
>     are really important. That means creating your own PCB,
>     effectively increasing the total time to bring it to a useful tool
>     that is plug and play, not only the time spent on learning and
>     implementing the algorithms.
>
>     That said, my feeling is that whoever implements these smarter
>     approaches to convolution on a sharc platform and shares it will
>     be eternally loved by the community. And once this happens likely
>     others with hardware know how will chime in. That's a short step
>     away from a sharc aleph-like.
>
>     An axoloti/nord-modular like interface and philosophy featuring
>     really good building blocks exploring a powerful DSP platform
>     would be amazing. Great for people wanting to develop their own
>     DSP ideas but also with potential to be poor man's kyma.
>
>     cheers
>     b
>
>
>     On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 8:49 AM cheater00 cheater00
>     <cheater00 at gmail.com <mailto:cheater00 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         It should also be said that the naiive algorithms have
>         quadratic runtime complexity whereas the best ones have much
>         better complexity (I believe n log n), so longer reverb tails
>         that can be done with the optimized algorithm are simply not
>         possible with the naiive approach, no matter how much hardware
>         you throw at it - so that might be another reason to spend the
>         time.
>
>
>         On Mon, 13 Feb 2017 14:40 cheater00 cheater00,
>         <cheater00 at gmail.com <mailto:cheater00 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>             The simplest FFT and convolution algorithms are easy to
>             understand in just hours, the really complex algorithm
>             could take weeks to implement, so if you're just doing
>             this for yourself the break even point is: will you
>             otherwise earn $200 - the difference between a dev board
>             with the cheapest DSPs and most powerful ones - in those
>             several weeks? If not, you might want to look into, uh,
>             flipping burgers or pizza delivery as a career move. If
>             you are doing this for production, or for other people to
>             build themselves, you want something relatively
>             inexpensive, though. The dev time might be warranted if
>             you do not mind spending it as a learning experience.
>
>
>             On Mon, 13 Feb 2017 10:38 Thomas Strathmann,
>             <thomas at pdp7.org <mailto:thomas at pdp7.org>> wrote:
>
>                 On 12/02/17 22:39, rsdio at audiobanshee.com
>                 <mailto:rsdio at audiobanshee.com> wrote:
>                 > So, when combining FIR and FFT processing for
>                 convolution, you'll
>                 > need MAC, bit-reversed addressing,
>                 automatically-wrapped buffer
>                 > pointers, and possibly other special instructions
>                 for maximum
>                 > efficiency at a given instruction clock rate.
>                 Hopefully the DSP you
>                 > choose will have example code in optimized assembly
>                 for a partitioned
>                 > convolution, and you won't have to piece all of this
>                 together
>                 > yourself. Yes, you could do it all in Standard C on
>                 a general purpose
>                 > ARM or XMOS, but you'll need a higher clock rate and
>                 more code to do
>                 > the same amount of work.
>
>                 I'm wondering: How precious would development time hav
>                 to be to warrant
>                 going with a DSP and optimized assembly code instead
>                 of taking the more
>                 blunt approach with a fast CPU and some plain C code?
>                 From following
>                 this discussion I get the impression that the answer
>                 to that question is
>                 "Very" but is that true?
>
>                         Thomas
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