sonatino

Absolutely. Coming from a software background, it's been eye-opening for me just how quickly those costs add up. And how painfully slow it can be to iterate.

I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't just enjoy making stuff. I probably won't break even for a long time, and even then the margins aren't great.

If you deploy to production and it goes live in a matter of seconds or minutes, be grateful you're in software :)

Good question! I haven't gotten around to proper SNR testing, but I'm planning to do that. The board design has undergone quite a few revisions and improvements based on my own perceptual tests along the way. I've done my best to follow best practices and recommendations, but the size of the board (which was a priority) does limit how much can reasonably be done. If you're looking for audiophile-level performance, you'll probably want to consider other solutions :)

It kind of depends on demand. So far I've been doing fairly small production runs to test the waters (and I'm still new to selling physical products; I'm a software engineer by day). If sales pick up, I'd love to start selling it in Europe.

Thanks for your comment! Yes, there is a place for higher sample rates and bit depths - especially for authoring content and playback on high-end systems. As you mention, real-time effects can also benefit.

I could have worded what I said better; I don't think people are arguing it's never needed, just that on a small board like this (with limited space for more filtering, isolation, balanced inputs/outputs, etc), other factors can somewhat limit the usefulness of higher sample rates and bit depths. That said, the audio quality has been great for the things I've done with the board.