Quote:
That's interesting. Has this been a recent comment, or from when he was active around 2011? At that time the MX1 was the Audinst flagship, the MX2 is a very recent release and benefits from a significant redesign. I would be interested to hear what he has to say about the new design. I'm sure the manufacturers must have been aware of the O2, at its price point it certainly seems like a response to the O2.
If the O2 design is as accomplished as it appears, why are other manufacturers not simply copying it? It is open source after all.
re: Audinst... that's from a while back. Also, the guy is known to have opinions (educated guesses? call them whatever you will) about stuff, even that he's not tested.
As for copying the O2, depends what you mean. If you're talking about building O2s, that's what people like Epiphany, JDSLabs, and Mayflower do, and commercially so.
It's not open source... You cannot modify it or use it for commercial purposes (like using the design as a basis for your commercial product). You can only use it as it is = be a commercial builder.
Of course, you could do whatever you want with the circuit for your DIY purposes... But not commercially.
It's open source but not completely unrestricted.
See this:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/
So a company copying it, modifying it, and selling an improvement (marketing it as such) isn't really permissible.
Now, the bigger deal is that a design like the O2, at least on a macro level, could be done by anybody. Pretty much every DIY designer's done something more complicated. O2 is the simplest possible two-stage amp topology out there. Only thing simpler is a one-op amp design, a CMoy. It's not like the idea broke any new ground or wasn't something that people could have done before. The circuit's just a bit more optimized than what most DIY designers could do without a bit of hard work, a decent audio analyzer, and a few board revisions. That just means that the performance has been improved from "most likely good enough" to "even more likely good enough" for most purposes, according to some. But any reasonable audio company could have designed the same with a bit of work.
O2's biggest innovation or contribution was the power / protection / battery run-down circuit... which ended up not working as intended for a lot of people, who used different batteries. Whoops. But that's a challenge of a DIY design where you're not as in control of which exact parts are used.
It's not like other companies have anything really novel to copy there, that they could use as an advantage. It didn't tell them something they didn't already know before. Well, if they weren't paying attention to certain other previous designs, then maybe they might not have thought about paralleling JRC4556s as a cheap way to implement a decently-high-current output. But there are plenty of buffers and other topologies you can use instead, that also work.
Saving an audiophile company a few bucks per unit on chip costs isn't going to make or break them.
