Great news as I am not a big Apple fan. Looking forward to getting my hands on one as soon as I can. Roon endpoint is great. Cannot wait to hear it.
Thanks for keeping us up to date. This chip shortage is nuts.
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Sounds like Apple is getting ready for AirPlay changes so it would not be a good time to include it. Let “Tim Apple” loose sleep over that. Besides there are alternatives especially for those of us looking toward 2-channel/home theater integration. I am looking at using Denon AVR that feeds its pre-out to SGCD so I can handle AirPlay through it if I must. Much more interested in the audio side. My PST needs friends!
Smart move.
And should make cost to produce much less
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Yes much less, 500$ less!!! 
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I was thinking $600.
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Perhaps with the PS trade-in program we can shave dollars off the net price.
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Why 500-600 less without AirPlay? Just curious. Is there a chip that Apple provides?
I believe there’s a chip and a license. But, I am not an expert in Apple licensing, or really anything else Apple related. Though I do like a nice crisp Tokyo Rose in the fall.
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Interesting. Other Apple chips are designed with our software but I didn’t know about an airplay chip.
Me neither. Perhaps some sort of firmware.
Mentor Graphics?
This sounds more like not wanting to pay the per device licensing fee just like with the Coversdigital board in the Bridge 2 which was fully Airplay compatible yet the Bridge 2 had no Airplay capability.
Airplay. The 28.8 baud modem-like work of mediocrity.
Will the AirLens decipher Morse code?
Total deal killer if it doesn’t!
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Hear Ya. 
Advantage of Airplay for me is it would bypass AppleTV’s automatic upsampling of its audio thru its HDMI output.
But hey ho, still sounds terrific.
I’ll leave the best sound quality stuff for Roon playing thru Airlens, i2s out into Directstream.
Cant wait.
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It’s an authentication chip to make sure you’re approved to use AirPlay. That chip costs us $0.20 but without it no way to play in Apple’s sandbox. They cannot supply it for close to 1 year.
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Damn
Interesting. If true I’d expect barely any other new streamer releases with Airplay for next year. Will be interesting to watch. Dcs just announced Lina with airplay. Different price tier but price not issue
@Paul ???
Would appreciate some additional insight from you or your designee at your convenience…
To be clear, my question is about options/connections for passing higher-rate DSD from AirLens to PSA DACs, new and old.
Cheers.
Gotta love open standards
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No, It’s a small private company. I can’t tell you officially because of Apple’s strict confidentiality rules (but can PM you if interested). However, we have totally displaced Mentor in this space (and in the process of doing so with the other big players Cadence and Synopsys).
My speciality is hardware verification—they use it our software to verify their massive Mac/phone/server chips (as also do other tier 1 companies like Google, Intel, Samsung etc.) Mentor really is not a competitor here. I used to be an architect at Synopsys and we pretty much killed off mentor in this space. Their place and route product is still very good.
(On a tangential note, I’ll tell you how stupid apple’s confidentiality rules are. They won’t even let you use their name in internal discussions; you had to use a code name. While at Synopsys there was a master list of all the people who had been officially qualified—after all kinds of background checks—to be in the exclusive club of people working with Apple on their designs. You had to consult it if speaking about the code named company. One day I had to write an email to some sales guy and had to look up whether he was in the Apple club. Turned out there were 2000 people on the list and at the time Synopsys had 6000 people!)
Hopefully Apple’s bots don’t scan PSA forums. Otherwise I’m toast.
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