2008/11/12 Pavel Hofman pavel.hofman@insite.cz:
Vedran Miletić napsal(a):
2008/11/12 Pavel Hofman pavel.hofman@insite.cz:
Vedran Miletić wrote:
Auzen started to distribute one cool new Envy24HT-S card, and it looks really interesting to me. Specs are awesome, and it also has word clock on card! http://www.auzentech.com/site/products/infra_quartet.php http://www.infra-sonic.com/site/p_PCI_quartet.php http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829156007
According to envy24.svobodno.com, it has: Infrasonic Quartet 0x3030 0x4953 Envy24HT-S - supported by ALSA AK4620B (ADC / DAC) - not sure, probably not supported? AK4112 - not sure either?
However it has Xilinx on card in similar way as ESI Juli@ does, so it's probably not a standard Envy24HT-S card. Any ideas if this card could be supported?
According to the block diagram in the User's Manual the Xilinx plays a major role. The FPGA provides even more functions than in Juli.
Without some information from the manufacturer (even if under NDA) the driver will be rather difficult to write. The FPGA is controlled by Envy's GPIOs and their signals would have to be electrically analyzed under Windows driver - a pretty complicated task. It is very different from a regular card with well-documented codecs only where you just need to trace codec pins to corresponding GPIOs.
Pavel.
First off, thanks for answering. I didn't expect anyone to answer, since this card isn't this common yet, so it surprised me that it caught someone's interest. Good :)
Well, IMHO, this card is as far as Envy24HT-S can go. Sure you can have more inputs/outputs, but at 4x4 and without breakout box that's it, in terms of features. So, I didn't expect the design to be simple at all. Not to mention unsupported DAC/ADC and DIT.
Yet, assuming we get the specifications from Infrasonic/Auzen, would you or anyone else be interested in coding a driver?
Well, I could work on the driver, it would be similar to Juli. ice1724.c is mostly ready for the proprietary clock model. The aforementioned chips have complete documentation publicly available. If I had the card physically to trace connection and test (I am no Takashi the wizard :) ) and some documentation available, it should be viable.
Honestly I am not going to purchase it myself, I have no other use for it plus PCI is almost history now. Unfortunately I have not met any PCI-express card with quality 44.1kHz playback (i.e. dedicated crystal clock).
Pavel.
I do agree that PCI is almost history nowadays. Better said, it should be. However, I see no viable replacement for Envy24 cards on PCI-E. Oxygen and X-Fi just don't cut it. Anything else?
Of course, when it comes to Envy on PCI-E there is Tokyo Style S010 DCS-SEV24, however that card doesn't support ASIO and since it uses PCI <--> PCI-E bridge it's performance (in low latency operation) will probably suck. And also it's not aimed at producers, and it doesn't even support ASIO in Windows. I believe there are no MIDI ports either.
Therefore, out of all those "new" Envy24-based cards (since that's basically what's available in this price range), Quartet stands out as basically the best producer-oriented solution out there. Even more than that - this is by far the best Envy24 card I have seen so far. Almost like there is nothing to add :-) It's not available where I live (Croatia), but it might be in the future since Auzen started to distribute it, that's why I was interested in possibility of ALSA driver for it appearing.
Well, I will contact Infrasonic in the coming days and let you know how it went. Fingers crossed.