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Information
Griffin iMic v0.06


vendor Griffin Technology
product iMic v0.06
interface USB 1.1
duplex full
channels 2
resolution 16 bits
max rate 48 Ksample/sec
codec Philips UDA1325H
operating system Ubuntu 5.04 Linux x86 2.6.10-5
driver usb_audio ALSA 1.0.6
buffer size input 64 KB, output 64 KB
test date Sep 19 2005
notes Frequent reseting and replugging of the iMic v0.06 device is necessary.  Occasionally the test machine hangs and the system has to be rebooted.

This iMic version has a thin USB cable.

Vendor=077d ProdID=07af Rev=0.06


This card is part of the Full Duplex DAQ comparison survey.

 
Sample Rate
The sample rate on DAQ cards is not a fixed absolute constant.  Like time, it fluctuates, and it is difficult to measure accurately.  Sometimes there are relationships between the input and output sample rates that can reveal interesting details about the inner working machinery.

The following table of measurements use a technique described in the sample rate stability application note. The rate column is the sample rate value that the collection hardware is programmed to.  The in/out rate and in/out error columns are absolute measurements of the ADC / DAC clock.  The loop error column uses a tone generator loopback method for a high accuracy measurement of the relative difference between the ADC and the DAC clocks.  The three error PPM columns are theoretically related by the formula: "in_error - out_error = loop_error"

Note that the test machine was not NTP disciplined since it was running from a live Linux-CD.  Previously the /etc/ntp/drift error for this machine was -7.858 PPM which can be used as a rough correction factor.

rate in rate out rate in error out error loop error
4000 4000.576 4000.619 +144.000 PPM +154.750 PPM ±91.5679 PPM * #
5510 5510.664 5510.530 +120.508 PPM +96.1887 PPM ±34.7539 PPM * #
8000 8000.66 8001.22 +82.5000 PPM +152.500 PPM ±7.3945 PPM *
11025 11026.12 11025.70 +101.587 PPM +63.4921 PPM ±220.925 PPM * #
12000 12001.25 12001.01 +104.167 PPM +84.1667 PPM ±89.9847 PPM * #
16000 16002.49 16002.31 +155.625 PPM +144.375 PPM ±7.6724 PPM *
22050 22053.19 22052.77 +144.671 PPM +125.624 PPM ±11.0448 PPM * #
24000 24003.52 24003.29 +146.667 PPM +137.083 PPM ±11.6123 PPM *
32000 32005.06 32005.07 +158.125 PPM +158.438 PPM ±2.3727 PPM
44100 44107.15 44107.16 +162.132 PPM +162.358 PPM ±2.2082 PPM
48000  48007.95  48007.94  +165.625 PPM  +165.417 PPM  ±2.4842 PPM 

The "#" symbol signifies the existence of many discontinuities in the the absolute sample rate measurement.  The accuracy of the affected in / out rates is questionable.

The "*" symbol signifies that many spectral glitches were observed in the the loop error measurement.  This has only a minor effect on accuracy since the Hz measurement was jumping around, hence the "±" sign.  The loop error data should be considered highly erroneous and it is a sign that something deeper is at work.  This will be further explored in the Frequency Domain section.  Below is an example of what the wideband spectral glitch looks like.



The spectrogram shows a faint ringing after the wideband burst for about 0.1 seconds.  The particular zero gap in the waveform plot is about 0.01 seconds in duration.  The zero gap begins with a decay to DC so the zero fill is occurring with the DAC stage.

For further investigation the -debugrate command line option was used to create the sample rate estimate plot shown below.



A popular periodicity in the above plot is 120 seconds.  60 seconds also pops up a couple times but the periodicity looks to be mostly random.  The discontinuities in the above plot look a lot like fragment drops but no xruns were reported.  Also, the periodic slips have a weak correlation with the timing of the spectral glitches.

This is not a normal sample rate convergence curve and it could be a problem with the design of the iMic or with the Linux USB audio drivers.  The 32000, 44100, and 48000 sample rates exhibit no instabilities so this is a sample rate dependent problem.



Initially this entire test suite was run with Fedora core3 (FC3) 2.6.11-1 ALSA 1.0.9rc2 on the same hardware.  The sample rate PPM errors were one to two orders magnitude greater with Fedora (see image).  This made testing so difficult that FC3 was abandoned for Ubuntu 5.04.  What is odd is that the components of Fedora and Ubuntu are extremely similar and very close in version number.  Kernel 2.6.11-1 vs. 2.6.10-5 and ALSA 1.0.9rc2 vs. 1.0.6.

 
Frequency Domain
The sound card's input and output jacks are connected with a short external cable and run in full duplex mode.  This is a loopback test and baudline's tone generator is the signal source.  Distortion, noise floor, filter response, and inter channel crosstalk are the frequency domain measurements of interest in this section. 

The signal test sources are a pure sine wave, a linear sine sweep, and WGN.  The sine wave is used for the distortions and crosstalk measurements.  The linear sine sweep and WGN are used for the filter characterization measurement.  Both are an application of the swept sine vs. WGN technique and are equivalent measures of the frequency response. 

Since spectral performance is a function of sample rate, each of the sound card's native rates will be tested.  The highest sample rate is usually the cleanest and this is advantageous because it allows the isolated testing of the ADC and the DAC.  The matched, source, and sink sample rate combinations are described below.

matched
The input and output sample rates are the same.  This combination tests the performance of both the ADC and the DAC in a matched mode of operation.  The linear sine sweep signal in the left spectrogram display and the WGN (orange) in the Average window characterize the in-band filter response.  The sine wave (green) in the Average window is used for distortion and crosstalk measurements.  The sine leakage (purple) is used for crosstalk measurement

source
The sample rate of the input (sink) is the card's highest clean rate.  This combination tests the performance of the DAC.  The linear sine sweep signal in the middle spectrogram display characterizes the DAC filter response.  The position of the pass-band and the stop-band filter transition is defined by the Nyquist frequency of the DAC.  The noise floor (purple) is the Average collection of a silent channel.

sink
The sample rate of the output (source) is the card's highest clean rate.  This combination tests the performance of the ADC.  The linear sine sweep signal in the rightmost spectrogram display and the orange curve in the Average window below it characterize the ADC filter response.  The position of both the pass-band and the stop-band filter transition is defined by time in the spectrogram and by folded frequency in the Average window.  The orange Average curve represents the pass-band while the cyan curve is a folded representation of the stop-band ADC filter response.  The noise floor (purple) is the Average collection of a silent channel.

The naming convention for the columns below is (DAC -> ADC) where DAC represents the source sample rate and ADC represents the sink sample rate. 


matched
source (DAC)
sink (ADC)
4000 -> 4000 4000 -> 48000 48000 -> 4000


5510 -> 5510 5510 -> 48000 48000 -> 5510


8000 -> 8000 8000 -> 48000 48000 -> 8000


11025 -> 11025 11025 -> 48000 48000 -> 11025


12000 -> 12000 12000 -> 48000 48000 -> 12000


16000 -> 16000 16000 -> 48000 48000 -> 16000


22050 -> 22050 22050 -> 48000 48000 -> 22050


24000 -> 24000 24000 -> 48000 48000 -> 24000


32000 -> 32000 32000 -> 48000 48000 -> 32000


44100 -> 44100 44100 -> 48000 48000 -> 44100


48000 -> 48000  
 


Fedora core3 and Ubuntu 5.04 had identical ADC and DAC filter shapes.  The spectral glitching in FC3 was more prominent which increased the difficultly of making clean measurements.  FC3 had an odd pink noise shaped frequency response [yellow] that required equalization [orange] by manually adjusting the Bass and Treble controls of an external mixer program (see image).  The default spectral shape for Ubuntu 5.04 was a flat frequency response.



distortion
The following table of measurements were made using the technique described in the sine distortion application note.  It is a full duplex test that uses a loopback of the tone generator to measure the various distortion parameters.  The stereo crosstalk column is a measure of channel leakage that uses a sine wave channel and a silent channel as the signal sources.

rate SNR THD SINAD ENOB SFDR crosstalk
4000 +86.59 dB -90.24 dB +85.03 dB +13.831 bits +94.93 dB -19.70 dB
5510 +86.64 dB -89.76 dB +84.92 dB +13.812 bits +94.61 dB -27.90 dB
8000 +87.59 dB -90.98 dB +85.95 dB +13.984 bits +94.48 dB -37.56 dB
11025 +86.52 dB -90.35 dB +85.01 dB +13.828 bits +94.04 dB -45.87 dB
12000 +85.99 dB -90.24 dB +84.60 dB +13.760 bits +93.65 dB -48.06 dB
16000 +85.92 dB -89.56 dB +84.36 dB +13.719 bits +93.41 dB -55.44 dB
22050 +86.69 dB -89.17 dB +84.74 dB +13.783 bits +93.26 dB -63.72 dB
24000 +86.02 dB -89.24 dB +84.33 dB +13.715 bits +93.60 dB -65.93 dB
32000 +85.58 dB -88.70 dB +83.85 dB +13.635 bits +93.72 dB -72.58 dB
44100 +85.18 dB -85.49 dB +82.32 dB +13.381 bits +92.51 dB -85.78 dB
48000  +84.06 dB  -85.99 dB  +81.91 dB  +13.312 bits  +93.81 dB  -90.55 dB 
48000 / 1024 +46.13 dB -inf.00 dB +46.13 dB +7.369 bits +50.72 dB -91.34 dB


The SNR, THD, SINAD, and ENOB all improve as the sample rate decreases.  What is unusual is that crosstalk gets worse as the sample rate decreases.  Crosstalk goes from -90 dB at 48000 to -20 dB at 4000 which is too much to be explained as an increase in cross channel leakage.  With other sound cards, the crosstalk actually improves as the sample rate decreases.  Something strange like a rogue AGC is operating inside the iMic v0.06 circuitry.

Fedora core3 and Ubuntu 5.04 had similar distortion measurements. 



deep zoom
So far the spectral performance of the iMic v0.06 looks very good.  The loop error instability in the Sample Rate section suggests that something strange is at work like an extreme amount of jitter.  This section will explore this anomaly with a concept know as deep spectral zoom.

The down mixer feature in the Input Devices window is used to perform a deep zoom into the frequency domain.  This DDC increases the frequency resolution and allows the observation of finely spaced spectral details.  The sample rate is 48000 with a 1024 decimation ratio for an effective 46.875 sample rate.  The 1024 decimation factor translates to the frequency resolution of an equivalent 1M point FFT.  Below are the standard sine wave, WGN, and crosstalk spectrum plots.  The spectrogram has a couple wideband glitches that are the same errors as seen in the Sample Rate section.

48000 / 512


Some very major distortion is creating a number of modulation spurs that lower the ENOB down to +7.369 bits.  The spurs are very dynamic, have a spacing of 4 Hz, and decrease the ENOB by 6 bits.  The distortion in the spectrogram display generates some unique patterns.  With other sound cards, such a deep zooming usually increases the ENOB by more than 1 bit and results in a clean spectrum.  The mystery remains hidden but something periodic and bad is definitely lurking inside the iMic's DSP logic. 

 
Quantization
A white Gaussian noise signal source was generated and captured in full duplex loopback fashion at each of the standard sample rates.  The Histogram plots below show a unique sample distribution that is dependent on sample rate.

5510, 11025, 12000, 22050

The point at the center line is caused by fragment slips that insert long sequences of zeros into the data stream.

4000 ... 48000

All sample rates except 5510, 11025, 12000 and 22050 have nice clean Gaussian shaped histogram curves.


 
Channel Delay
A sine wave signal was generated and captured in full duplex loopback mode.  The time domain response was observed with the Waveform window where the green curve represents the left channel and the purple curve represents the right channel. 



The iMic v0.06 has a zero sample inter channel delay at all sample rates.

 
Analysis
The wild variance and the erratic behavior of the loop error sample rate measurement prompted the deep spectral zoom investigation which found some very unusual modulation spurs.  These modulation spurs add noise to signals at all sample rates.  They have a 4 Hz spacing, contaminate all signals, and reduce the ENOB measurement by 5 bits.  The source is likely an AGC or an internal filter problem.

Wideband spectral glitching was observed at all sample rates but the lower rates suffer the greatest from the affliction.  The 5510, 11025, and 12000 sample are excessively problematic.  The spectral glitches match the discontinuities seen in the sample rate estimates and the DC peak in the quantization histograms.  The spectral glitches are the result of the erroneous insertion of zeros and are likely caused by a USB or a driver problem. 

The ADC / DAC filters are very sharp and well defined above the 5510 sample rate.  The ADC filter at the 4000 and 5510 sample rates is nonexistent but this doesn't significantly hurt the distortion measurements. 

Fedora core3 had larger sample rate errors more spectral glitching that Ubuntu 5.04 had.  Distortion measurements between the two Linux distributions were almost identical.

 
Conclusion
The iMic v0.06 has very sharp ADC / DAC filters, clean spectrogram sine sweeps, and extremely good distortion measurements.  Unfortunately it has a number of serious flaws hidden under the surface that required inquisitive and rigorous testing to find.  The wideband spectral glitches and the modulated spurs reduce the iMic's performance rating from Excellent to Poor. 

The choice of Linux distribution plays an important role in quality and performance.  In the case of the iMic v0.06, Ubuntu 5.04 was superior to Fedora core3.

If you must use an iMic v0.06 then use the 32000, 44100, or the 48000 sample rates.  The lower rates just have too many problems. 

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