Lynx E44

The E44 PCI Express card is designed to satisfy the most demanding professional recording and broadcast studio requirements. Built upon the legacy of the industry-leading LynxONE and LynxTWO cards, the E series takes a leap forward to offer the highest performance A/D and D/A conversion system ever incorporated into a PCI Express card. In fact the E44 performance even eclipses that of the Lynx Aurora converters. Since 1998, Lynx has provided high-reliability add-in cards engineered for 24/7 operation. The E series improves upon this tradition with upgraded enhancements for I/O protection and shielding.

The E44 is roughly the equivalent of the LynxTWO-A in a PCI Express format.

The E44 card utilises sophisticated design methodologies to achieve high performance levels. Components are meticulously chosen to support low noise and distortion. Circuit topologies are compact and cancel external noise pickup. Capacitors with solid dielectrics provide high reliability and long life. Considerable effort is applied to PCB layout which focuses on component placement and routing of traces, as well as copious use of copper planes for shielding and power distribution.

The power available from the PCI Express bus offers a particular challenge due to the lack of a negative supply rail which is required to power analog amplifier stages. The E series utilises a unique scheme to generate supply rails that are extremely low noise while being very tolerant of poorly designed computer power supplies.

The use of field-programmable-gate-arrays (FPGA) is another core technology pioneered for use in audio devices by Lynx. The E series uses the latest devices with a wealth of resources for parallel processing in our 16 X 8 mixer and V2 DMA engine which maximises throughput on the PCIe bus while minimising CPU workload. As always, FPGA’s allow for field-upgradeability to add features in the future.

Applications