Index

Platform index

10 platforms. Each entry records where the audio actually happens, what the processor really is, how firmware is packaged and validated, and what remains unknown. Sort, filter and search below; every row on a detail page carries its own confidence label.

Yamaha QL1

Digital mixing console · 2014

A nine-processor console whose mixing DSPs have no instruction memory at all — the audio path is fixed-function silicon configured through a register file.

DocumentedFixed-function DSPµITRONSH-4ADanteSHARC

Yamaha DM3

Digital mixing console · 2023

Nine years newer than the QL and sharing almost nothing with it but the parameter framework — including, crucially, the same DSP philosophy.

PartialLinuxNamed-component archiveDanteFPGALoadable DSP

Allen & Heath SQ-5

Digital mixing console · 2018

A 55 MB firmware image that contains none of the mixer. The entire audio path lives in FPGA fabric behind an undocumented AXI register map.

DocumentedFPGA mixingZynq-7000Bare metalAMPNo signing

Midas HD96

Digital mixing console · 2021

The one console examined whose control plane is wide open: a full Linux computer speaking documented Thrift and Protobuf. The mixer still lives in FPGA fabric — but the bitstreams ship in the clear and the exact parts are known.

DocumentedLinux (Jetson TK1)Spartan-6 mixingProtobuf control busAES50No image encryption

Behringer WING Compact

Digital mixing console · 2022

The only platform here being studied to build on rather than to understand — and the only one where the container format was analysed, found opaque, and then declared off the critical path.

ActiveSHARCEfinix Trioni.MX 6AES50Clean room

Waves SoundGrid

Audio-over-Ethernet platform · 2010

Not a console, but the transport a great many of them hang off. Documented from both ends at once — the server firmware and the host driver are the same protocol version.

DocumentedLayer 2EtherType 0x8908Realtime LinuxNode modelInteroperability

Violet Audio dMix 128

Digital mixing console — control plane · 2024

Control-plane work rather than a firmware teardown — undertaken to drive the console from a bespoke surface rather than to understand its internals.

PartialControl protocolVSKPMIDIREST/OSCSurface

Stoatworks Labs LOOM

Reference design — open console

Not a teardown. The open console these teardowns keep pointing at — included because "what would you build instead" is the question every one of them ends on.

Reference designZynq UltraScale+FPGA mixingDanteAES67Milan

Allen & Heath dLive

Digital mixing console · 2016

Appears in existing work only as the larger sibling platform to the SQ. No analysis has been performed.

CandidateNot started

Behringer / Midas X32 / M32

Digital mixing console · 2012

Referenced in the WING work as the platform with the most prior open-source activity. No analysis of our own has been performed.

CandidateNot started