16 audio outs?

[alexalex22]

Hi, Im completely new to arduino, but very good at music and sound synthesis.
First let me apologize in advance for my bad english... i'm french speaking (from Montreal).

I have a couple of questions:

1) do you have/sell a piece of equipment that you plug in a computer via usb and that gets recognise by a digital audio workstation (for exemple protools or Ableton Live) and that have a lot of individuals outputs. Like a audio interface. What I would like to do is stream 16 individuals mono tracks from my Ableton Live to 16 tiny speakers. All the speakers playing one different track of 16 tracks.

2) This question does not involve a computer use other than just dump the code to the chip (so no use of a digital work station). Lets say I want to make a very simple piece: 16 sine wave generated with Teensy: all sine waves are individually sent to 1 speaker (so 16 speakers in total, each playing a different tone), how many Teensy USB Development Board and how many Audio Adaptor Board for Teensy should I buy??

Thx !

Alex

 

[PaulStoffregen]

1) do you have/sell a piece of equipment that you plug in a computer via usb and that gets recognise by a digital audio workstation (for exemple protools or Ableton Live) and that have a lot of individuals outputs. Like a audio interface. What I would like to do is stream 16 individuals mono tracks from my Ableton Live to 16 tiny speakers. All the speakers playing one different track of 16 tracks.

No. This is far more than can fit in the 12 Mbit/sec USB speed we currently have.

In the future when we have 480 Mbit/sec USB device (on Teensy 3.6 the fast USB port is host only), this sort of feature will become possible. But for now we just don't have enough USB bandwidth for so many channels.

2) This question does not involve a computer use other than just dump the code to the chip (so no use of a digital work station). Lets say I want to make a very simple piece: 16 sine wave generated with Teensy: all sine waves are individually sent to 1 speaker (so 16 speakers in total, each playing a different tone), how many Teensy USB Development Board and how many Audio Adaptor Board for Teensy should I buy??

One Teensy 3.2 can easily run 16 instances of the sine wave synth, plus mixers and other stuff.

But 16 physical outputs is quite a challenge. In theory it could be done with TDM. But so far the largest TDM output hardware actually tested only used 8 of the 16 output slots.

https://www.oshpark.com/shared_projects/2Yj6rFaW

So for 16 separate physical analog outputs, you'd need 2 of this custom board, and a Teensy board on each one. But those custom boards are only available as a bare PCB. Much DIY surface mount soldering required.

Using hardware you can buy off-the-shelf, it could be done with 8 of the audio shields and 4 Teensy 3.2 or 3.5 or 3.6 boards. It's possible to use 2 shields with a single Teensy, using a slight hardware mod. The mod is a little easier with 3.5 or 3.6, where the extra wire connects to one of the convenient outside pins. With 3.2, the mod to use 2 shields with 1 Teensy requires soldering a wire to the bottom side pads.