Audio, hi-fi and car audio - Anybody built a DAC kit?

"Serge Auckland" wrote in
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Serge Auckland wrote:
wrote:
tony sayer wrote:
In article
, Serge
Auckland writes
Andy Evans wrote:
What I did when I needed an ADC, is to get a
Crystal Semiconductors evaluation board. They do
them also for their DAC chips. This is a complete
ADC or DAC on a board, with DIP switches for
setting it up. All you need is a power supply and a
box to put it into. They cost about the same as the DAC-AH, but you
get the latest
chipset. How do you get such a thing? Knock twice and ask
for Crystal? In your case, what was your receiver chip and what
was the DAC chip? How long ago? Did it sound good?
Do tell us more. Andy
The best thing to do is to look up www.crystal.com Find the chip you
want and see if they do an
evaluation board. You can download the manual for
the chip and the board, and make sure it's exactly
what you need. Then, find a Crystal Semiconductors distributor in
your territory, get a price and buy one. I bought
the CS5335 ADC board about 7 years ago when I got my
Meridian D1500 'speakers as these only have digital
inputs, so I have to convert my analogue sources.
The CS5335 is a 20 bit ADC, and I leave it on 48k
sampling, which is fine for my vinyl and FM radio. As to sound, I
compared it with one commercial unit,
the Lindos LSC24 A-D/D-A converter and couldn't hear
any difference with the sources available. I also
put it back-to-back ( Digital out from CD to LSC24,
analogue out of the LSC24 to Crystal ADC, digital
out to 'speakers) with the LSC24 and sent a digital signal to my
'speakers and again, it was transparent
using a CD as a source. This, to me, means that I
wouldn't be deriving any benefit from something
"better". S.

Any idea of suppliers Serge?...
--
Tony Sayer
A friend built a couple of these and lent them to me.A
complete waste of time I reckon.
Any well executed modern budget CD player would
probably sound better.They sound quite smooth but very
two dimensional.
Any idea what measurable parameters would account for a
two-dimensional sound?

S.

Serge,
My apologies.i was refering to the kits using the
phillips 1543 non oversampling kits .
I have a Pioneer 705 with many modifications including a
Crystal CS43122 chip in place of the original.
If you are interested in the other mods I can give the
details. I am yet to hear a better sounding CD player or DAC.I
used to own a Metaxas MASDAC that cost $5000 which was
also very good, but not as good as this moded Pioneer.
So the CS43122 must be pretty good.

JT

Some years ago, the company I was working for was
developing high-end studio AD&DA converters. The
electronic design wasn't too difficult, but the PC board
layout was hyper-critical if the circuits were to be
totally stable. The great benefit of using Crystal's
evaluation boards was that the layout is optimised, so
you know what you're measuring and listening to is the
best that chipset can do. When you have your own boards
made, you can compare them with the Crystal reference to
make sure that nothing has been degraded. That's what
gave me the idea of using an evaluation board when I
needed an ADC as I had confidence that the design was
optimised.
At the time, the AKM D-A chips had a better spec than the
equivalent Crystal D-As but it was the other way round
for A-Ds. I would expect that today they would be so
close as to be indistinguishable.

There are still a lot of products that mix and match AKM and Cirrus
(Crystal) products as you mention.

BTW, thanks for contributing your clear and factual discussion of the issues
involved in DAC projects.