Kasina First Impressions

[FrankV]

Wow, that's all I can say!!! I have been using L&S machines for about 20 years now, this is my 5th L&S, and it's BY FAR the best. To get good results with older machines I had to often turn up the brightness of the glasses, making them uncomfortable for me. With the Kasina the lights no longer seem 'brute forced' and there are many more subtleties to them. I still have to experiment more with the new encoding system, but first impressions are really positive.

I also like the quality of the headphones. Normally this is something I immediately replace with higher quality ones, but in this case it's not needed at all, they are really good!! The wires of the headphone are some kind of flat cables. This is really perfect, because they don't get mingled up all the time. The audiochip in the device also seems to be of high quality, the music sound fantastic.

I also like the fact that now we can put the audiotracks on the SD card, and no longer have the rely on an external device that is connected via a patch cable.

Are there any negative points? Well, I can think of two: No support for FLAC encoded files (would have been nice but I can still use WAV files which are about 2 times bigger in size). And the cord to the glasses seems very fragile where it is right where the glasses are. I can seen 3 thin wires, two of them don't have any insulation, and they are wide in the open, not under any protection. I'm worried they might get shorted or break off after some time of use.

All in all this is definitely the next generation of L&S systems, and this would be the only one I would still recommend to other people.

[neuroasis]

Hi FrankV,
Very happy that you have positive first impressions with the Kasina. It sounds like you have been working with AVS systems almost since the beginning. That really adds a great deal of weight to what you are saying. MindPlace has been producing machines all of that time and the Kasina is a culmination of all that we have learned (and dreamed about).

It will probably be the case that many long term L&S users will really appreciate the new glasses. We believe that we have finally hit upon the right balance of color and power for closed eye use. For readers, the new glasses have 12 LEDs. 3 Blue, 2 Green, 1 Red in each eye. The takes into account the 'red bias' of closed eye light transmission and allows us to mix subtle colors.

Earbuds are much more convenient but it is hard to find quality ones. We worked to find suitable ones that will work for many people out of the box with 3 interchangeable ear cup sizes. And as you note the flat cables are really nice.

Concerning audio codecs, when manufacturing hardware, this is where the so called 'free' codecs have a cost associated with them. We pay a royalty for the MP3 codec for every machine produced. This is the most widespread codec though so it was necessary. We also looked at FLAC and OGG but comprises had to be made when using chipsets that met our other requirements. WAV is for the audiofile.

The cable on the glasses is the same system and by the same factory that we have been using for years. We have very few returns of the glasses, so at least the design is battle tested. BTW, we also have a one year warranty on accessories.

Anyway, thank you very much for the feedback and let us know how you get along while using the Kasina.

Enjoy,
Scotto

[Robert Austin]

Thanks for your positive feedback, FrankV! During the design phase, WAV was initially going to be the sole file format. We tried for some time to make FLAC work, but it is a memory hog and just wouldn't fit into available RAM. So we settled on MP3 as the near universal standard. There are a number of purpose built IC's which can decode multiple formats, but for engineering reasons, they would not work for us.

The audio chip we are using is high quality and has a surprising amount of headroom; I'm using Audio Technica ATH-M50s at home with my Kasina, and no way would I want to turn the volume up all the way... :-)

-Robert

[FrankV]

Well, thanks for the quick replies also. I can see that this is a well supported and researched device. Not having FLAC is OK, since memory cards are dirt cheap these days anyway. Is there any maximum size that the Kasina can support? Can for example 64GB versions be used?

And seeing how broadly the MP3 format is used, that was also a good call having to support that one.

[Mind-Shop]

I have been down to our local computer store today ... and they did only have 64GB SDXC cards (no SDHC in that size) - so I purchased another 64BG SDXC card and formatted it from exFAT to FAT32 by using the guiformat.exe tool which you will find attached to this post. It?s a simple exe-file which does not require any installation on the computer. Simply download the zip-Folder, unzip it and then double click the guiformat.exe in order to re-format your SDXC card to FAT32. It?s really simple and self-explaining.

After having done so, my KASINA now recognizes that 64GB SDXC card ... and it works perfectly. I did already copy the content of my former 32GB card to the re-formatted 64GB card and now operate my KASINA with that 64GB card.

@ Robert: Maybe you want to put this simple formatting tool together with a short explanation to the KASINA support section - so customers will know how they can utilize SD cards larger than 32GB for the use with the KASINA. ;-)
You should possibly also make the users aware that FAT32 does only support file sizes of up to 4GB - so the files that are being put onto an FAT32 formatted SD card should not be larger than that size - although it is rather unlikely that sessions files in mp3 format are being larger than that.

All the best

Claudius

[Andy]

Thanks for doing that experiment!
Reading up on FAT32, the largest volume it can format is 8TB, so that means that for the forseeable future, there should be no limitation on the maximum size of the micro-SD card that will work in the Kasina.
This is good information! I made an article about this.