The official Lessloss Laminar Streamer SD card player thread

[Cebolla]

Had to dig this up - over 2 years since the OP made the prediction that the Laminar Streamer was 'about to turn the CA world on it's head', this remains vaporware. After the farcical 'we cant show you whats behind the curtain' show debut and the 'less than 15k' guesstimate, LessLoss seem to have decided this wasnt actually their finest hour.

The best & unanswered point to the old thread, IMO, was the excellent post by Gordon Rankin:

Louis,

 

Let me clarify a few things from someone who has worked on chips for 30 years.

 

All modern day dacs with exception to ladder units, only rely on the Master Clock as the reference point for all jitter related errors. Therefore locating the Master Clock (or clocks) as close to the dac chip as possible will result in the lowest jitter. Locating the clock at the computer would result in the worst possible jitter.

 

Gross jitter related errors can happen at the I2S level if large amount of jitter occur. So if you feedback the Master Clock located at the dac chip to the component creating the I2S feed, then you will result in the lowest jitter.

 

Of course reclocking with that same Master Clock at the dac chip will result in lowering the variation caused by circuit board trace lengths and other variables between the Audio Receiver and the dac chip.

 

Putting the clock at the computer is actually the worst place to do this. I have written tons of software since 1981 when I released some of my first code in CPM, then DOS, Windows, Mac, UNIX, Linux and other platforms. Creating the system you are talking about is a waste of time. You need to get the clock back in the DAC and then use asynchronous flow control to get the data to the DAC in a way so that the data does not underrun or overrrun.

 

Also you want to isolate completely the link between the noisey CPU and the DAC chip so there will not be any of that noise present in the DAC and Analog sections.

 

I would take a better look at your system as it is not a good solution.

 

Thanks,

Gordon

Yet two years later, where's the mention of high end DAC audio players that take advantage of the lowest possible jitter from a local master clock and the shortest path of digital audio signal travel? The vast majority on this site are still software or hardware player tethering to a separate (playerless) DAC component.

[Audio_ELF]

Wow, that's over 2 years to reply to a post! I'm surprised you can still remember your original train of thought

I was wondering wtf was I writing about!

[Louis Motek - LessLoss]

Sorry for the radio silence. The project, for us as a small operation, is very ambitious. You would not believe how many times we have already transported the 55 lbs housings back and forth from Lithuania to Germany, searching for a lacquer formulation which will be pliable enough to withstand the slight but very strong changes in inner tension of the dense Panzerholz material upon travel. We were getting micro-cracks through the lacquer. It's no wonder that nobody uses Panzerholz in this 3D fashion. Even if it is inherently stable, wood is still wood, so it still has some play depending on temperature, moisture, and likely even altitude changes.

 

We've been busy re-vamping the entire schematic because we decided to add some features which necessitated moving some things around on the main circuit board. And because we already had everything calculated to shortest possible signal paths, it became another huge project to redo the entire schematic. There are ways to get this done automatically (by computer programs) with the result that the circuit board becomes four times larger in dimensions, and thus it is lossey already just because of those long signal paths.

 

The Laminar Streamer, in case you don't know, is just a source and contains no analogue output. One will be able to use any DAC one wants with it, and one will be able to use an asynchronously running re-clocking DAC if one chooses to do so.

 

We are continuing to chase our dream and have just received our first batch of circuit boards. Although they are SMT, we are going to put the first couple together by hand and see if there is no mistake. Going to have to get out that microscope...!

 

We did our first silk screen on the plate for the control buttons and for the back panel, but because the back panel is round in shape, the silk screen company didn't have a flat edge to go by and the result came out crooked. So they'll have to do it all over again, and again we wait.

 

All of this waiting is inevitable. We go to companies who have 100+ employees and we say "Hey guys, can you halt your 5 million dollar orders for a while while we give you this really round, strange, heavy, useless item to mill, sandblast, and chrome plate? Thanks, it's ok, we'll wait. Oh, no, you heard us right, it's not aluminum, it's actually steel... Oh, ok, we'll wait longer. No problem..." Then after 10 weeks they send us the results... actually their mistakes... from Austria.

 

So it's been a long waiting game but we continue to work. Here are some pictures.

 

Louis Motek

LessLoss Audio

 

[Kal Rubinson]

Wow, that's over 2 years to reply to a post! I'm surprised you can still remember your original train of thought

 

I was wondering wtf was I writing about!

I could not recall those earlier but I noticed them after someone resuscitated the thread and I responded.

[monteverdi]

I just got a SDTrans384 board and it is by far the best digital source to feed my DAC via SPDIF (BCN to RCA). I have also a Astell&Kern AK120 which plays from SD-cards and is much more versatile in U. Its digital output is toslink and sounds a lot less good.

So not every SD card player is sounding equal but I am curious about the Lessloss implementation especially what outputs, UI etc.

I am somewhat amazed to read that the fancy casework is the main problem for that delay. A lot of equipment is becoming jewelry for rich clients often with very ostentatious design. Leeloss did discontinue its panzerholz power purifier and replaced it with a small but very effective firewall module (which is 1/20 of the price of the previous model. Recommended!

[Stereo]

It's more expensive than a base MSB Select DAC II: Laminar Streamer SD player : High end SD player | Solid state memory player | Computer audio player