I recieved the DSP/ARM TI OMAPL138 LCDK developer board and managed to get the audio passthrough demo working on the DSP core.

The chip fairly hot with just two channels of audio IO. That makes me question how low power a solution this will really be.

Its all very involved and theres two cores, one ARM9 and one DSP C6743 core. My head is still trying to recover from trying to learn SYS/BIOS os and all the bizzare things that come with having one ARM9 core CPU and one DSP on the same chip.

I think I will just make what I originally set out to make and leave the DSP for later.

Yes it will work better and no dought support multichannel audio recording do SSD etc etc..

BUT Coding in the Midi support / getting the ADC's DAC's PGA gain controlers all controlled by the ARM or DSP makes me shiver with fear ! ok , maybe its easy for some people , but I'm not that great at using Arduino librarys, let alone doing all this in ARM or DSP !!

So onwards with the 8 : 2 channel stereo mixer. back to the simple arduino and 2 x 8 channel DACs to make the stereo Pans happen !

The arduino makes me smile, the DSP development board just scares the **** out of me !! Thats before I even look up how to intergrate the OMAPL138 DSP/ARM chip into a pcb design. even the developer baord claims its not using proper power sequencing to start the cheap to try and save money !!! mmm.

So, just wired up 4 PGA2500 PGA's for the gain controled preamps which should work with the Arduino SPI in a chain. I suppose I'll just copy the board and make another if it works !

The PGA2500's also have some simple GPIO outputs !! I'll try and use them to switch on/off the phantom power supply to the individual audio inputs for powering condesor mics etc.

I've ordered some 8 channel darlington transistor matrix ic's that can handel switching the 48v phantom power, so I'm thinking I could hook a gpio output from each of the PGA2500's to the trasistor matrix.

I'll post some pictrues of these wired up and finished soon as I get them working with the +-5v power supply

Also, I'm hunting for a box !!

I got quoted £ 256 ( 360$ ? ) for a company to make a stainless steel box !! with no holes drilled in it for the XLR adapter etc !! plastic it is then ..