Category Archives: audio hardware

Arduino software control for WM8804/WM8805

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WM8804 application board (eBay) modified to output CLKOUT pin (yellow-black wire)

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 →

Measuring USB devices with an Audio Precision System One or Two

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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.

Tenor T7022, an often-encountered USB receiver. Does it do bit correct feed-through?

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.

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AKM AK4393

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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 →

WM8741 vs. ESS9023

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I’ve been looking at designing a D/A converter for a while now. In my experience these are some of the hardest audio components to do right. It started with building output stages over a decade ago and at some point I even found myself in a company designing a D/A converter transistor by transistor.

However, as recent experiments have shown, I still have a lot to learn.

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The Case for Digital Volume Control

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Many audio systems are at least partly analogue, i.e. there are analogue sources and there is an analogue pre- or power amplifier. However, it is becoming more and more often the case that there are no analogue sources at all, or that due to the presence of a DSP in the system, all analogue inputs are converted to digital.

In the case where your audio system is primarily digital, many people still swear by analogue volume control. And I don’t really get it – I have never understood the reasons quoted for doing so, and the added complexity (not to mention more components in the signal path!) is just cumbersome. Even colleagues whom I regard to be absolute geniuses and designed some of the world’s best D/A converter chips could not convince me why this would be a good solution.

So, I’m going to put a stake in the ground here and open the floor to what I expect will be a massive flame war. Bring it on… Continue reading →

Ultranalyzer reference measurements

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When you are using consumer-grade sound equipment to measure consumer-grade sound equipment you are potentially setting yourself up for a major pitfall: how do you know you will be able to see the DUT‘s performance and not that of your measurement gear? The first way to make sure is of course to use measurement gear of very high performance, outclassing most of the stuff that will be measured with it, leading to the choice of the delta 1010.  But that’s only step 1. Therefore I decided to make some measurements to see what the 1010 is capable of. We should be able to get close to specifications of the D/A (and/or) A/D converter used, but how close and what that looks like remains to be seen! Continue reading →

The Ultranalyzer

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As you may have noticed, there’s not much audio content here yet. That’s because I’m currently not only bubbling with ideas, but also working without good tools. So before we design anything, we need to have the right tools in order.

Priority one was a useful desk scope / multimeter: check.
Priority two is a spectrum / audio analyzer.

Now I actually do own one, I never threw away my trusty Spectral Dynamics SD375 . But as with my big Tektronix o’scope, it’s a bit of a boat anchor to keep around the house. So rest assured both of these are safely in storage, and I’m busy training my son to appreciate them so he can inherit and care for them one day hopefully far from today.

I’ve been scouting for an Audio Precision on eBay a bit, but without much success. I’m not ready to shell out thousands of bucks for something that is extremely cool, but still flawed. You see, the one thing an AP has going for it is credibility. You show any old weird curve and as long as it has the AP logo on the right hand top corner, you’re golden. And let’s not forget the bragging rights. “Yeah sure, I’ve got an AP at home” – gets all the girls!

But foregoing that, it has to be admitted that especially the system one machines are showing their age. The user interface runs under DOS or windows 98. Wow. forget attaching an internet enabled network cable to those beasts.
AP themselves do not recommend buying one. Of course if I was selling system twos, I’d also recommend against buying a machine I’m no longer selling. But they do have a point: there is some custom hardware in there and when that breaks, you’re done for. No support, no parts.

Reflecting on all of that for a bit, I pondered what the alternative could be. A good sound card with a PC sounds like the logical choice. A quick inventory actually turned up some quite decent parts:

Hardware

  • M-audio Delta 1010. One of my favourite sound cards. I can safely say that now that I have gathered at least enough of them for my own use. I scoured them in parts, buying the cards and the break-out boxes separately, and built internal power supplies in each of them. SNR is around 110 dB which is very good but of course not stellar. However for distortion it’s more than enough, and if it is about finding noise floors all I have to add is a low noise preamp. The Delta range is excellently supported under both windows and linux, and built for heavy duty use (some clearly showing signs of it).  At least a 15 year production run with minimal changes shows that this was a very good basic design. There are some potential tweaks that I’m sure will show up here one day, but as a rule of thumb you cannot go wrong with this card and for the (used) price, it’s simply a winner.
  • VIA EVCM-F mini-ITX motherboard with a 1 GHz CPU and a VT8235M chipset. It seems they were made for POS (point-of-sale aka cash registers) and I do agree about the POS part. I bought this off eBay hundreds of years ago. Unfortunately I could only find a 256MB stick of RAM but bigger ones should cost pennies if I’m feeling frisky to supercharge this beast.  I don’t even know the original purpose I had for it anymore (I think it did have to do something with a Delta card), but the great thing is it runs warm but not hot with just a few small heat sinks. Together with a 12V power supply adapter fed from a laptop brick and a compact flash to PATA adapter with a 4GB Sandisk extreme III card it is quiet. Quiet as in SILENT. Your move, Audio Precision.
slow but cool

VIA itx system

That should do it! As slow as this junk hardware is, it probably runs circles around the machines that AP had to work with. The downside is of course that this box will have to do all the heavy analysis (FFT, deconvolution, averaging, etc) lifting. Well, it’s an experiment.

Software

Even though there are a few very nice audio analysis programs for windows, this box is going to run linux. No discussion. Hobby is supposed to be fun, not torture.
Due to the limited hardware capabilities it would have to be a pretty small foot print version, but at the same time it would have to be able to run some exotic software. That led me to Archlinux. Their modular design and custom package manager ticks the right boxes, and the support on their wiki is just stellar.
Getting Arch to run was easy enough. One hiccup was that the disk was formatted as a GPT partition and syslinux is not a good bootloader for that. At least I could not get it to run. GRUB2 did just fine and in just a few hours I had a running machine. Less time than a fresh windows install needs to pull in its 8,000 updates.

The window manager is LXDE, but mostly I’ll be logging in over SSH with X forwarding so just X11 would have been enough. The screenshots below are made on an Ubuntu machine using X11 forwarding.

Jack Alsa Audio Analyzer

Jack Alsa Audio Analyzer

The first analysis programs I installed are Jaaa and baudline. More on that in a subsequent post. It’s not exactly APone style functionality yet, but at least jaaa and japa are open source and that means what you don’t have, you can build. In this case it is unfortunately true that I only trust AP to do a proper implementation, and all others have to be open source and if not, I guess I have little choice but to lead the way. This story is just beginning…

Baudline

Baudline

All in all, spending a day or so installing some very nice software and re-using dust-gathering equipment now means I can do some pretty impressive and reproducible measurements. As soon as I’ve cleared my desk and built this all into some enclosure…