Playback Designs Firmware Update

Rtn1, firmware is software which is embedded in hardware. :^) Firmware are the effectively the Operating Systems of electronic devices. In some cases, but obviously not most cases, electronics are equipped with a way of updating that software. The most obvious example is the BIOS of your PC. Some firmware can be hacked, like the button combinations on the remote which will allow a DVD player to become a region-free DVD player, or at least I've heard about those things... :^)

I always wondered why high-end DACs did not actually put everything into FPGAs when the software was there. With the right 'gatekeeper' (pun only partially :^), the IP can be protected, and it could be updated on a regular basis. With even a simple OS and some RAM, users could keep all the older algos and directly compare. Eventually, I suppose this goes down the road of loading the data into RAM and processing it realtime, which I would have imagined FPGAs do quite well.

Dcstep/Dave, I bet you are right - it can probably be voiced in a variety of areas - from upsampling algo to analog gain stage after DAC output, and several places between. I am surprised about the trumpet problems not being there, being there, then not being there on a reinstall - sounds like a bug in software setup in v18 (not so much the filters themselves but the way one part reads the status of another part). Not being a PD guy (neither in English, nor French), I don't know the version history, but if he's not careful, Andreas might incur the contempt of Audiofeil, who seems skeptical of a high upgrade count :^)