Massdrop copycat R2R DAC

[lkong]

https://www.massdrop.com/buy/massdrop-x-airist-audio-r-2r-dac/talk/2101227?utm_source=linkshare&referer=TYMJB2

On the left, sosolar's design since 2015, on the right "Massdrop Made" by Airist audio.

That's a new low for Massdrop.

[spritzer]

Well they are in bed with Cavalli so what else could be expected... ?

[justin]

having made lots of circuit boards its funny to read the comments of the people who are going with the "only so many ways to do it"

this was copied down to designer personal preference level

[kevin gilmore]

I expect that the fpga code has been leaked and pretty soon everyone will have 24 bit sign magnitude dacs that convert dsd.

also this uses actual switches, not the 8 bit shift registers, so it's a better quality product than some of the stupidly priced things.

massdrop seems to be doing their best to drop the bottom out of the audio market

 

[gepardcv]

I'm all for knocking down absurd prices, but the decision to dig in puzzles me. The product is getting dragged through the mud on every audio forum, along with Massdrop's name and reputation. Its comms/PR people, assuming they exist, have undoubtedly advised a strong mea culpa along with a solid dose of public groveling, and have so far been ignored. It doesn't even matter if the design was ripped off or not. Assuming the Massdrop-Airist contract was written by someone with minimal understanding, it would have included indemnification clauses specifically for this purpose, allowing Massdrop to ditch Airist with minimal legal fuss.

Perhaps Massdrop is financially stretched, and eating the cost of the product and reimbursing the backers would be ruinous.

Edited June 9, 2018 by gepardcv

[kevin gilmore]

years ago I designed a r2r/sacd dac which I would still like to do. But the fpga code was something I knew nothing about, and when I went searching for someone to do the code I ended up with absurd prices in the $350k range. Now given the amount of time that may have been put into this, that was probably not completely out of the range of reasonable. Over the years that price has dropped, a lot recently, someone is willing to sell me the code for $5k. So its clear that the code has been ripped, or reverse engineered and the source code is now readily available.  

Its also clear from those pictures that the massdrop board is a virtual identical copy of the hibiki board. There is evidently software out there that will take gerber files and turn them back into editable layout files. my guess is that the firmware in the 2 boards is at least marginally different. so they are not the same even though from a hardware standpoint they are completely identical.

in the end its probably going to be shown that even the stupid high priced spreads (msb,totaldac…) will have a code base that started at the same root.

another year or 2 and this will all be public domain. Then the math wizzes out there will be able to work on the FIR and IIR code for optimization.

 

[lkong]

5 hours ago, kevin gilmore said:

years ago I designed a r2r/sacd dac which I would still like to do. But the fpga code was something I knew nothing about, and when I went searching for someone to do the code I ended up with absurd prices in the $350k range. Now given the amount of time that may have been put into this, that was probably not completely out of the range of reasonable. Over the years that price has dropped, a lot recently, someone is willing to sell me the code for $5k. So its clear that the code has been ripped, or reverse engineered and the source code is now readily available.  

Its also clear from those pictures that the massdrop board is a virtual identical copy of the hibiki board. There is evidently software out there that will take gerber files and turn them back into editable layout files. my guess is that the firmware in the 2 boards is at least marginally different. so they are not the same even though from a hardware standpoint they are completely identical.

in the end its probably going to be shown that even the stupid high priced spreads (msb,totaldac…) will have a code base that started at the same root.

another year or 2 and this will all be public domain. Then the math wizzes out there will be able to work on the FIR and IIR code for optimization.

 

I happened to know sosolar personally. Maybe a collaboration after this wave of MD shit show?