maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - WIP: USB audio output - N900 as an "audiophile" portable music player

	fpp	2012-04-02 , 19:20
	Posts: 2,853 \| Thanked: 968 times \| Joined on Nov 2005	#54

Originally Posted by jerryfreak

for some background on similar application, many of us have been recording 24-bit 96khz spdif with dell axims for almost a decade using a PDAudio compact flash card audio interface. ive used this same card to record to a $200 old notebook with a cfcard/pcmcia adapter and alsa drivers with ecasound command line. this was before the dawn of decent USB audio solutions, of which there are now many...

You are very right, the sad truth of the story is that there is nothing new at all here.

Ten years ago, the iRiver H1x0 had an optical spdif out (which could even be hacked into coax), and audiophiles were using them with their DACs.

Right as we speak, some Gen9 Archos tablets have an USB Host port and a modified Linux kernel that lets them play music to an external DAC. They are otherwise uninteresting as tablets go, and not very portable, but Archos made them more capable (probably quite easily) than all other Android devices.

So this is very well known and basic technology, and not even costly to implement. It's just that there is no market interest because the user base is so small (although if Apple were to "invent" the iDAC I'm sure even deaf people would buy it :-).

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