The bill of materials needs to come way down to sell it for much less than that. Buying the parts in hobbyist-level bulk (100 pcs) probably would only shave $100 from the final price.

I had dreamed of physical "analog" controls as a standard feature on keyboards and input devices for various applications -- would be great productivity booster for power users.

I wish this catches on and gets mass adoption.

While I wish I had the time and talent to pursue this as a hobby - and I dabbled in PCBs and DIY electronics in youth - life has other plans.

I see some sibling commenta that link to keyboards with a knobs-- that is cool - but I am imagining having access to more than one knob so I have a bank of at least 5-6 knobs, slightly smaller than the DIY project, so I can program them for multiple uses like we do for Function Keys today.

Imagine stream deck with knobs instead of buttons - and available either as a separate USB/wireless device or as a simple "nuneric keypad" / "function keys /media keys" kind of addition to keyboards

Also, online services built into these will die before the speakers do.

I am not sure however if your estimation is correct for all cases. The amount of killed tweeters I have seen would not have happened with an active speaker..

My 1978 (no brand) speakers are still in excellent condition, so are the 1991 Bose. Hifiberry works fine. ymmv

And as a known electronics guy people bring their broken stuff to me for at least the last decade.

If you handle stuff correctly it will survive. But the point about reliability is to also take into account how stuff survives when it is abused.

Now maybe that is because I am an electronics guy and people come to me with their broken stuff and I see what actually breaks, but isn't the point of a public forum to say something and be occasionally wrong? Should I rather have stayed silent?

I don't know about you, but if some knowledgeable person corrects me, I am grateful for getting a check on my perspectives. This is the value of discussion.

I'd say active (especially digital active) is too much of an improvement to pass up, but if you only want to talk about waste and reliability, try to find about support and spare parts company policy. Some prestigious passive brands like Revel have some forum horror stories about lack of spare parts for 10 year old models that barely got discontinued while Genelec says https://www.genelec.com/product-warranty-lifetime

Also, as someone mentioned, advanced (thermal based) limiters saving tweeter voice coils.

Disclaimer: I am a fanboy owning a pair of 8341A.

I also never had an amp fail other than by cranking it up too high with the wrong speakers.

But speakers are something very subjective, and while I’m still delighted with the Canton I got for a discount, your ear might prefer something different. This is something where comparing in a physical store with a passionate salesperson can be worth it.

When I was buying speakers for my apartment some time ago, I was similarly considering going for the all-in-one options like this, but I’m glad I didn’t. I prefer the “dumb passive speaker + networked amp”, as it allows you to pick / replace / upgrade the separate components. Went for the KEF LS50, and for the amp Lyngdorf TDAI-1120. And that’s despite KEF having the all-in-one active version of those speakers. Very happy with my choices!

The wireless model has significantly better bass response and sounds much better to my ear.

I actually had a fault with them recently and they stopped working, I’d bought the speakers used on ebay and even had I had a warranty they were past 5 years old by the point the fault developed. Regardless, kef repaired them entirely for free. 10/10 would buy again.

The other part is that they hugely overbuild the amplifier sections (at least by rating -- 280W for the mid-woofer and 100W for the tweeter.

Close! I moved from a "speakers + non-networked amp + streamer" setup.

I'm still running separate components for nearer-field listening at my desk, where I've got KEF Q150s powered by a small Schiit pre-amp and amp.

Volume controls need to be logarithmic, not linear.

To a first degree approximation, everybody gets this wrong.

Doing this stuff well is pretty hard (e.g. designing filters that can do that kind of volume adjustment is hard because you want to be constantly adjusting them, which means you need to be super careful with your filter state) but I have heard what it sounds like, and once you hear it you get angry at all other volume controls.

The amp I'm upgrading from was interesting in this regard. In addition to the main volume knob, it had a loudness knob. The manual actually recommended keeping the volume knob fixed most of the time and using the loudness knob to set the listening level throughout the day.

From the manual:

> 1. Set the LOUDNESS control to the FLAT position.

> 2. Rotate the VOLUME control on the front panel (or press VOLUME +/– on the remote control) to set the sound output level to the loudest listening level that you would listen to.

> 3. Rotate the LOUDNESS control counterclockwise until the desired volume is obtained.

https://docs.ruuda.nl/musium/loudness/

This works because function.toString() in modern runtimes gives you back fully parse-able input source.

You need to make sure you don’t reference anything outside the function, but it’s generally nicer overall than JS-in-string.

Then you treat it as an IIFE. Example:

    function globalJS() { document.write('hi') }
    const html = ``

Overall a nice technique!

TIL - that is good to know. I'll probably leave the post as-is but I will use that in the future.

  With that system, I could set the amplifier’s analog volume knob such that the max volume out of the streamer corresponded to my actual maximum preferred listening volume, giving me access to the full range of Spotify or AirPlay’s volume controls.

[1] that's why there were so many different "classes" of amps, they're all making different tradeoffs about how they're doing the amplification.

(Ignoring the additional quantization issue with a scaled digital input.)

But hey, very low distortion.

Where this breaks down is if the analog signal path (after the DAC) consists of something noisy after the attenuator. Passive attenuation (like built into an amp, or the master fader of a mixer, etc.) won't add noise, but something active like an outboard EQ would. The attenuation to set desired max level must be completely last (before power amp) to avoid noise.

On the other hand, I use a Schiit Asgard at my desk, where I have it connected to my Mac via USB-C. In that setup, I have no control over the volume level going in to the Asgard. MacOS just disables the software volume control when I'm using that audio output.

In reality though, this project is more about the fun of it than about it being a really pressing need.

That's really helpful to know. At this point though, I'm excited enough to build a volume knob that I'll probably still do it.

edit: After trying this out it a bit, it's definitely an improvement over the small sliders and a huge improvement over the stepped volume changes from the buttons, but I'm still left wishing I could make use of more than ~10% of the slider's full range.

I haven't really tried YouTube Music, but I'll give it a go. I've been meaning to try out Tidal too but haven't yet.

On an actual technical side, I can stream to multiple devices concurrently, the interface is cleaner and it supports a local music library.

There's a reason why local web applications aren't a collection of HTML and JS files, and are instead full copies of the Chromium browser.

Imagine double-clicking a malicious page.html and suddenly your entire Documents folder can be fetched and manipulated by JavaScript. Yikes.

But to your latter point, yeah, there’s no reason sandboxed web apps couldn’t be given better file:// permissions.