In playing performous with microphone pass-through (i.e. having music play from a laptop, several people sing and have their voices amplified through the same speakers, while at the same time recording the voices to the PC for score-keeping), latency and realtimeliness are serious issues.
While the JACK way seems to accomplish the best that's generally possible given the general constraints, there's only so much that can be done when routing audio through USB (typically the only interface available for multiple sound channels on a laptop).
Note that these are all non-issues when not amplifying the voices (which is the usual scenario in small rooms / home sceanarios); this is primarily relevant to stage-like or karaoke-bar setups that to my current knowledge require a setup consisting of a mixing table and several (or a large) external sound cards.
Hardware that can be attached to a laptop that provides
It appears that even professional sound cards with hardware routing only come with two microphone inputs, and the go-to solution for most other requirements is to go through a large hardware mixing table first.
Dedicated hardware could be built for this purpose. It would consist of
This could be easily scaled up to 8 microphone inputs with twice the number of ADCs.
When using a single microprocessor, parts for the 4-microphone version would be <10€ for semiconductors in 100pcs quantity; the connectors amount to another 10€ (provided they can be directly PCB-mounted; a front panel solution needs more expensive wiring). A PCB could probably be done in dual-layer 80x40mm and would add another 3€, assembly at 5€ (now I start guessing), and I have no clue how to do the casing.
But seems it should be manufacturable for about 30€. (Note, obviously, that's a manufacturing price that gets you an assembled kit; not claiming any suitability for a retail product; might be a good starting point to think about crowd funding, though.)
The critical attributes of the main microprocessor are * USB 2.0 High Speed * 3 I2S ports (preferably 5 for the scaled-up version).
The STM32F4 and STM32F7 series seem to have several devices that check these boxes (eg. the STM32F723IE); their clock rates should suffice to do the calculations inbetween the frames. It might be necessary to run without DMA as to receive the right interrupts to do the calculation for one side while the other side is transmitting. There'll be a TX buffer empty on the sending side twice per sample / four times per cycle, so there's ample opportunity to start calculation -- and given the synchronicity of the channels, work for all should be doable in any of their interrupts, as they become ready about the same time. The remaining time (ie. outside the interrupt handlers) would be needed to pack the audio data for USB and handle actual packet transmission (which is largly DMA management).
The synchronized audio input of four channels could double as a neat tool in toying with microphone arrays; four omnidirectional microphones should give some basic direction sensing, and could (with the stere output) possibly be combined into some kind of sonar system.
For larger scale location and audio synchronization, it may make sense to synchronize audio streams. That can be accomplished by a dedicated GPIO pin for synchronization (which might reset the LR clock or at least inject a timestamp). On larger scales, radio or GPS-driven clock synchronization would be nice to have.
Too many projects around to follow up on this; it would scratch an itch, but nothing more right now.
The next steps before sketching up a schematic (fun as it'd be) would be verifying that there are no USB soundcards with hardware routing/mixing and sufficient audio inputs around.
This page is part of chrysn's public personal idea incubator; go up for its other entries, or read about the idea of having an idea incubator for more information on what this is.