Hi all
I'm in the planning stage for a (hobbyist-level) digital MIDI synthesizer, built using an FPGA for the actual synthesis and a Raspberry Pi + touch screen for the user interface. One critical component, though, is a good quality DAC to get actual music out of it.
I've seen several examples of DIY DAC made inside a FPGA, using PWM or PDM techniques. The one I like the best so far is zipcpu's
Bit-reversed counter PDM technique. It's very clever! I'm still in the initial stage for my FPGA circuit, so I can't test it yet and have no idea what it sounds like. But I'm afraid that, while clever, it won't stand a chance compared to a high-quality DAC board, including all the passive filtering and noise control and whatnot (which I'm definitely not good enough to design and build.)
Therefore I'm looking for a good (high quality but not "audiophile"-priced!) discrete stereo DAC board, that I can drive from my FPGA as a plan B, in case I can't get good audio output with the various PWM techniques (which is very likely.)
I've found something on
HiFiBerry, such as their
€25 model (which is more or less my budget) but those are designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi, so I would have to reverse engineer their protocol to drive them from my FPGA. Also they only have RCA jacks, no amplified headphone output, which would be nice to have.
Does anybody have any pointers?
The reason I'm looking for a ready made board is, as I mentioned, high quality (hi-fi) audio output is tricky, because it depends on high quality components and careful component matching, and I'm more of a software / digital circuit person, so all the analog wizardry is unfortunately beyond me.