What is wrong with this?

Kicad’s opamp drawing. The humanity!
Just a quick mention about recent outage. It appears the site was taken over by a spotty teenager in his basement running CMS brute force scripts…
If that was you: hey contact me, I’ll send you some breadboards, tubes, transistors and an old oscilloscope. Go teach yourself electronics, one day you may find you have a nice job. I might even be the one to give it to you 🙂
Much to my chagrin, I can now add PHP to my skill set. I could have lived a long happy life not knowing a thing about PHP and just program in solder instead. If you do spot broken links or things not working, contact me.
Some recent comments (which were actually really nice and constructive) were unfortunately lost. Obviously I’ve tightened security and will make backups more frequently, but couldn’t avoid this. I have been really positively surprised about the level and the tone of comments on itsonlyaudio.com – such an enormous contrast to ultranalog.com back in the day! Please keep commenting!
One page I was in the process of writing was also lost, I’ll have to write it again, until then I’ll just leave you with a nice visual preview.
More soon…
Since it took me about 8 hours to fetch all the information together and get it running, maybe this post will be useful for other loonies like me who think this is a good idea 🙂
You see, the Microchip PICkit3 seems like a steal – a cheap, full featured PIC programmer that can also write EEPROMs!
Well, they weren’t lying. Then again, it’s not exactly the truth either. Continue reading
Recently I needed a special type of I2S signal, namely a 4 signal set of DATA, BCLK, FCLK and also an MCLK of 49.152 MHz.
Many modern DACs, DSPs and digital power amplifiers need this high clock frequency. And of course you would want this signal to be synchronous to the Frame Clock such that the converter has a fixed number of MCLK per FCLK cycles so as to minimize jitter.
Many S/PDIF receivers implement a fixed clocking in hardware mode which limits your options and flexibility, so it is worth exploring software control. It is really not so hard. Continue reading
There is one thing the older Audio Precision System One and Twos don’t have which can be quite annoying: they don’t have USB host functionality. And given that all the processing and clocking happens inside the unit, the control software can’t reroute the digital signal generator to a USB output.
Of course you can use a PC to feed the USB sound card and measure the output with the AP, but then you don’t have the generator signal to do e.g. sweeps or automation. The best of course would be to somehow get to a full loop starting at the AP signal generator back to the analyzer. After quite a lot of tinkering, I managed to do just that.
Surely, you can’t have missed that Linn are giving away a bunch of 24 bit tracks at the end of the year?
Last year, I had to log in every day and still managed to miss a few days, luckily some buddies helped out and we got the collection complete.
This year, they’ve been extra generous and left the whole collection up for grabs until January 6th. So in thanking them I’ll happily plug the Linn site for all my readers (yes, both of you).
Linn Records – 24 bits of Christmas
As the year draws to a close and we prepare for many changes in 2015, I’ll plug in the same wm8741 that Linn use in the Klimax and enjoy the recordings. I’m not a big classic fan, but some of the recordings in this collection are absolutely breathtaking. Well either that or I’m getting older.
Enjoy and see you in 2015, which is shaping up to be a pretty exciting year!
Over the last few months, I’ve played with many recent D/A converter chips and shown that some of them show quite significant but hidden distortion. The only brand I hadn’t captured yet was one of the world’s most famous – Burr Brown (now part of TI). Continue reading
Another post, another D/A converter. Yes, this is one of my soap boxes and hopefully I’ll be able to post something else soon. Sorry folks, we have to get through this… 🙂 Continue reading
Another D/A converter chip had the pleasure of spending some time with the Audio Precision. This time it was the ADAU1966, on the official evaluation board from Analog Devices. Continue reading
The following measurements were taken with an M-audio Delta 1010 sound card, using channels 7 and 8. These cards have an AKM AK4393 D/A converter. The M-audio has an otherwise fault-free design and is a great converter for the price.
Input was S/PDIF, output balanced -4 dBV.
I’m dropping the raw measurements here with little comments as long as the results are in line with what you’d expect from a device like this, since I’m mostly interested in the IMD measurements, after the last post… Continue reading