Very high sampling rates

    andrea agostini
    Jun 23 2015 | 8:11 am
    Hi guys.
    My first post in the gear forum ;)
    One of my students is investigating the possibility of building a system for hybrid digital/analog video synthesis (something I know nothing about), and explained me that optimal results would require oscillators tuned at frequencies well beyond the audio range (hundreds of kHz and more) and, subsequently, very high sampling rates your old MOTU 828 won't provide. A quick search revealed that there is some interesting gear around, from exoteric 384kHz audio cards to a 1.5GHz dac built by Texas Instruments, but before looking deeper I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this kind of scenario.
    Any suggestion is welcome! aa
    • Roman Thilenius
      Jun 23 2015 | 9:29 am
      i wonder what kind of video hardware that should be which requires audio in without supplying that itself?
      and i dont know of audio cards suporting more than 384 khz, and i am not even sure if OSX will support higher rates at all. :)
    • andrea agostini
      Jun 23 2015 | 5:53 pm
      The idea (see e.g. https://vfoldsynth.wordpress.com ) is that if you feed periodic signals into the rgb inputs of an analog screen you get interesting results, but the useful frequency range for these signals is much wider than the audio range. Indeed, you can easily achieve that range by using analog equipment, but the question here is – can we do it in the digital realm?
      Anyway, I'm not sure either if OSX/Win/Max impose a hard limit to the audio sampling rate, but you can also think of workarounds (multiplexing, ...)
      Still looking for suggestions and advice!
      Thanks, aa