[LAD] Is RME HDSPe AES supported by alsa?

[Niels Mayer]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Reuben Martin <reuben.m at gmail.com> wrote:

> IIRC, they put such a huge matrix on it because they designed one chip to
> slap on all their cards in that family. Saves money to just design and fab
> one chip instead of a separate chip for each unit.


RME uses FPGA's, which is why they're so expensive (
http://www.rme-audio.de/en_support_techinfo.php?page=content/support/en_support_techinfo_hdsp_totalmix_hardware
).
It's several bazillion of these
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FPGA_cell_example.png that you can connect
up into any electronic circuit you want.  I'd imagine they designed it so
that each FPGA takes a certain number of channels and there's an addressing
limit to how many FPGA's can be chained together in a multi-channel rig...
thus the 64  channels of inputs even though each card has only 16 ins.

It seems like after so many years of production, now that they've stabilzed
on a particular architecture, they could have come up with custom VLSI to
replace the FPGA and save everybody a bunch of money; and allow their cards
to be used by a wider number of musicians whose budgets send them to
"prosumer" cards with chips like
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/audio/controllers/envy24/ ; these
implement their 20-channel 36-bit wide digital mixer in VLSI, and derive
significant economies of scale from the fact that they can sell one of their
chips in every PC made.

I'm not complaining BTW, I'm just jealous of those that have RME cards. :-)
For that price, I bet they don't stick any quasi-balanced outputs on their
equipment and call them balanced like M-audio does for their Delta series
.... ( which is actually "balanced" from an impedance and/or marketing
perspective
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_audio#Differential_signalling ).

-- Niels
http://nielsmayer.com
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