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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

The idea and the execution is seriously innovative and impressive.

(After troubleshooting a local issue with a failing USB microphone I can verify that the live mode works great. This is the real deal.)

Don't miss the photos of the physical setup from the gallery features to the right of the pedal detail pages; excerpt:

https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...

It's Raspberry Pi-based. Can anyone identify that presumably audio add-on board with lots of connectors? Perhaps it's a one-off inhouse design.

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Looks custom. That's quite a board sitting on top. https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...

Yikes.

Yeah. Makes you wonder why the PI was even needed.

Well, it's a well-engineered, -documented, and -supported stable platform to handle computing needs for that giant board. Makes perfect sense, I think.

I know. I was making a bit of a joke. It's a very impressive build. ;-)

The PI is needed for bridging our PCM3060 based custom sound card(via hardware i2s) with a WebRTC client that connects to the customer. It also handles all the high end internet connectivity and allows us to easily flash the microcontrollers with new software. It could have been done with audiointerfaces instead, but this approach is truly modular and allows us to scale it easily.

It's a inhouse design with a PCM3060 as audio codec.

After doing my research: Thomann is a very large reseller (1700 employees according to wikipedia) in musical equipment.

What's the story behind how a reseller got into designing custom raspberry pi add-on boards to demo third party pedals online?

According to their blog posts it was a contract work by another company: https://feinarbyte.de/projekte/stompenberg/ (german site)

Their name seems to be a pun on "Feinarbeit", or "fine work". I love how Germany is full of those small, super-specialised tech companies.

They also are behind the design of Harley Benton branded instruments, which are made in China although under a decent quality control. I have two HB 5 string basses, the former was the bare minimum I could afford to move to the 5 strings world and see how I adapted to it. That bass wasn't great but it was well set up and tuned, had a decent neck binding, the electronic was really quiet and the sound, although a bit rubber-ish and lacking some sustain, was good enough for playing in a band in which the guitarist played gear that cost 10 times more without anyone noticing. One year later I purchased one of their HBZ-2005, which besides being a piece of beauty sounds fantastic. I paid it about 220€ years ago, before they bumped the price to about 300€ - bummer, I was considering the purchase of a spare one. Apparently it was too good to be that cheap.

My dream guitar was a Gibson Double Cut Special, because of Johnny Thunders. I finally got one for almost €3000 but hated it and returned. Then, Harley Benton released a similar model for less than €200 and it became my favourite guitar. They're amazing little instruments.

Thomann are a brilliant company, old school customer service, competitive prices, great selection. I hate that Brexit has made buying from them not worth it.

Not a musician, but it's kinda cool that they grew from

https://thumbs.static-thomann.de/thumb/thumb1000x/pics/image...

I know exactly what you mean with "old school customer service". I really hope these niched retailers stray strong against Amazon.

They're still managing to ship to the UK. You lose all the consumer protection (thanks, Conservative party!) and have to pay VAT and import dues (thanks, Conservative party!) but they're managing. They're still a fab company.

Do you know which digipots were used? Like ericwood above I too have heard anecdotal reports discouraging their use in most analog audio circuits.

afaik they are mostly discouraged because of the various challenges coming with them (like zero crossing at high amplitudes, capacitance, etc), but it's not like it's impossible to deal with all of that.

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