"Efficient" audio amp selection

The problem inherently defies a simple partitioning. E.g., if you want to drive speakers directly, you partition the streams differently than if you want to drive a "typical" home theater system (i.e., all of the interfaces in a single location to connect to external kit).

The degenerate case -- one channel, one speaker -- is the obvious building block. But, doesn't lend itself well to network deployment (esp wired networks).

The CODEC I've designed really only wants to deal with two audio "channels", at most. (Yes, I could change that) Consider, the more "channels" you support in the stream, the more resources you implicitly require on the ends of that stream.

Eg., if you pack 5.1 into a single stream, then the client device has to be able to unpack and DECODE all of those streams in the same "unit time" that it could otherwise have been responsible for a *single* (or, perhaps *pair* of) "channel".

I.e., you can't just arbitrarily scale up the "width" of each stream without consequences on the clients (and the goal is to make the clients *really* simple and inexpensive)

(sigh) Yes. The problem is trying to be "considerate" (accommodating?) of future users' needs. I could, instead, just focus on *my* needs and offer *my* implementations as "reference designs" and let other folks "roll their own". IME, this is too high a bar for many people to reach. It seems far easier for people to repeat someone else's success and make *minor* changes than to try to "grok" the underlying truths and extrapolate those to another implementation. Esp when there are lots of subtleties in the design that they may not be qualified to understand or accommodate (in another implementation).

Yes, it becomes a matter of tradeoffs. If you set up to optimize for one or two cases other cases may become intractable. It is not clear of = there is a sufficiently flexible answer to do most cases reasonably well.

I seem to have been unclear again. The 5.1 (SPDIF) stream goes to a home theater unit that does the rest from just the digital stream.

place

thus

Perhaps if you place the design in creative commons or such, you may wish to place a trio of designs and discuss the tradeoffs for selecting one basis or another for the other users who wish to adapt it. A lot more work that way though.

?-)

Ooooo.... that's a clever idea! I.e., support digital outputs for those cases - instead of multiple analog outputs!

This could considerably simplify those "drops" -- since there is virtually no DSP work done in the client. It just becomes a simple transport protocol...

(unfortunately, it doesn't apply to *all* cases)