gdjacobs wrote:In an ideal world, you could depend on any downstream amplifier input being deterministic, but impedance characteristics just aren't the same between designs.
Yea, but my point has always been to integrate the amp on the PCB, so it becomes part of the design.
Because imho, the Covox is pretty useless by itself, because the output is too low for any of the normal things you'd want to connect to it (headphones, line-in of some amp, unpowered speakers... powered speakers may work, but might be too noisy and not very loud, because the input is much lower than what they normally expect).
I would much prefer it to have a 'normal' output level, like any common sound card.
The real Covox solved this by having custom-designed powered speakers, so they modified the pre-amp in the speakers to work with the low output of the Covox.
Many clones used lower resistance to get more gain on the line-out, but as we found, you trade in linearity in the DAC, so the sound quality suffers considerably.