[LAU] digital upgrade of older equipment via I2S with jitter attenuating S/PDIF receiver evaluation board ??

There's this interesting product I came across: an evaluation board
from Wolfson Micro for the WM8804 high-performance SPDIF transmitter:
http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/news/258 . This might be an interesting
way to upgrade older soundcards (e.g upgrading 10 year old ICE1712
designs w/ modern DACs & reduced jitter while still retaining stable
snd-ice1712 drivers) or digital synthesizers and other A/V equipment
to give older perfectly serviceable equipment the latest D/A's and an
improved output section.

http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/products/WM8804
http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/uploads/documents/en/WM8804EV1M_Configurations.pdf
http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/uploads/documents/en/WM8804_Schematic%20and%20Layout.pdf

Lots of potentially useful applications with this evaluation board,
all ready to go:
* optical/coax --> spdif with de-jitter.
* i2s --> spdif with de-jitter
* resync incoming i2s stream w/ external spdif clock
* USB control (?)
* onboard monitoring via WM8726 high performance stereo DAC up to
24bit/192k, w/ hardware selection of data interface format, mute,
de-emphasis, justification, etc. (which should make it easy to work
with or emulate existing computer soundcard DAC's that one might want
to update to the latest technology).

I'd like to hear people's opinions on whether this is a useful or good
product to invest time into? Specification-wise, the de-jittering
capability looks impressive, appears to better some of the competing
products "on paper." All of which might make the $200.00 pricetag (for
the evaluation board, not the chip itself) palatable (I've called the
local distributor for samples). Once proven, such a circuit could be
constructed for far less than $200 cost of the evaluation board. The
WM8804 itself is pretty cheap and fairly self-contained, and so is the
included DAC.... Then again, so is
http://cgi.ebay.com/24bit-192KHz-DAC-DIY-KIT-FULL-ASSEMBLED-KIT-PCM1798-/330444818304
or http://cgi.ebay.com/HIgh-End-CD-Player-DAC-Upgrade-Mod-Kit-BB-PCM67U-DAC-AE-/230418195291

versus
http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Wolfson-Microelectronics/WM8804-6152-DS20-EV1/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMvMXbh32ZmHABhefv%252bfyptd

WM8804-6152-DS20-EV1
Manufacturer: Wolfson Microelectronics
Description: Audio Modules & Development Tools WM8804 Eval Board
........
The WM8804 is a high performance S/PDIF transceiver which offers a
state-of-the-art jitter attenuating S/PDIF receiver design. The WM8804
customer evaluation board provides full functionality for the
evaluation of the WM8804 device. ... Software to configure the
evaluation board can be downloaded from
http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/support/drivers
(unfortunately, all the drivers SW is for Windows, and
http://opensource.wolfsonmicro.com/ doesn't mention the 8804...).
....

Niels
http://nielsmayer.com
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Received on Sat Jun 26 04:15:02 2010