NOT QUITE NEVER AGAIN, THE GROUP BUY DAC BUILD

[Sligolad]

I found some small ceramic heaters on Amazon and bought a few, they have worked very well for heating the crystals and make a big improvement in sound....bang for buck is amazing.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/HALJIA-Ceramic ... 3EKX92VP9R
Have it running off 3.3v Lifepo4 battery at the moment and it holds about 70C on the crystal with a wrap of Kapton tape, a regulator at about 3.5v should bring it up to about 80C.

[randytsuch]

I found some small ceramic heaters on Amazon and bought a few, they have worked very well for heating the crystals and make a big improvement in sound....bang for buck is amazing.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/HALJIA-Ceramic ... 3EKX92VP9R
Have it running off 3.3v Lifepo4 battery at the moment and it holds about 70C on the crystal with a wrap of Kapton tape, a regulator at about 3.5v should bring it up to about 80C.

Nice, now I really want one lol. I actually have one of his original boards and the first crystals he offered, maybe I'll go ahead and build it up.

If you put some insulation around your crystal/heater, should make it warmer, and keep the temp more consistent. Cutting up strips of Styrofoam would work. Even duct tape all the way around would help a little.

[Sligolad]

Nice, now I really want one lol. I actually have one of his original boards and the first crystals he offered, maybe I'll go ahead and build it up.

They are good....i got mine on the secong GB in early 2017 and they had been sitting around since!!

If you put some insulation around your crystal/heater, should make it warmer, and keep the temp more consistent. Cutting up strips of Styrofoam would work. Even duct tape all the way around would help a little.

I added a couple more wraps of Kapton tape and now temp is at 78C measuring on the open top of the can. So i think i will just add some tape across the top to seal it completely and i should be good at about 80C.
Sound is great just as it is and I always knew good clocks with good power supply were important but these take it to a new level of importance of digital playback.

[gstew]

Here's a question for people like Nige and Randy who have extensively modified Soekris DACs (mostly with LiFePO4 supplies) and are now playing with the DAC in this thread (with UltraCap supplies).

My last mod to my Soekris setups was a last hurrah before I started playing with LiFePO4 and UC supplies. My current 'best' setups are a somewhat modified Allo.com Katana with 2 5V UC rails (and an AC-powered +-15V for the output stages) and an also modified Ian GB FiFoPi->Dual-Mono ES9038Q2M DAC->Ian's IVStd OR Slagle Transformer output with 2 3.3V UC rails for the FiFoPi and DM DAC and Ian's LiFePO4 board feeding +-13.3V to the active stage when I use it (both are very good to my ears). BTW, the Ian GB setup beats the Katana overall, though I suspect using Ian's LiFePO4 board's +-13.3V rails to power the Katana output stages would bring them much closer together).

I get that this multistack PCM1794 NOS DAC with UC supplies is a significant step up from the previous Soekris setups. My question is whether it makes sense to do one final mod-set to my Soekris to convert them to use mostly UC rails, with +-5V (output shift registers fed from super-reg-modified Soekris regulators), 3.3Vx2 (FPGA, clock), 1.2V (FPGA core). AND I have to keep a rail to keep the mute circuit functioning, but I wouldn't use UCs there.

If I do this do you expect I'll get a good bit of the way to this Super UC'd DDDAC? Or is that just spending mod time for no good reason and I should put the Soekris setups to the side and go onto other projects.

Thanks for your answers!

Greg in Mississippi

P.S. I also have plans to apply the upgraded single-board DDDAC configuration (as championed by Carlsor on DIYAudio) to my modified Sony HAP Z1-ES (Dual Mono PCM1795), also using UC and LiFePO4 rails. While I don't expect it to beat either the Soekris as above or your ultra UC'd DDDAC setups, I want to make it into a pretty nice & trick 'go-to' music server for day-to-day and backup purposes. On this one I'd use Ian Canada's new boards designed to automatically charge UC's to their target (5V or 3.3V) rail while immediately supplying that voltage to the fed circuit. This should make the Sony a pretty much turn-on and forget it setup, except that the FET buffer output stage before the final transformers would be fed from Ian's LiFePO4 board and be a 'turn-on to listen' proposition. Any comments on this application?

[randytsuch]

Hi Greg
So I really can't answer, I haven't built this dac. My current dac is from ian, and I never compared it to my soekris. Soekris is mothballed and would take some effort to resurrect so any comparison is unlikely.

Haven't been working on my system since covid started, and not sure when I'll restart any projects. I would like to get in the next diyaudio clock group buy which is supposed to be coming soon.

Randy

[seeteeyou]

Maybe it's gonna sound like a heresy that might get me thrown under the bus, recently someone in Japan figured out how to implement both McDualXO as well as McFIFO from IanCanada inside his Jitter Free Sound Model DAC-7 and ALL effects of upstream components before the DAC could be nullified accordingly

http://toukiyakoneko.web.fc2.com/Jitter ... V1.0.0.pdf

They're asking for 600,000 yen to build that ES9038PRO-based DAC

https://www.my-hiend.com/vbb/showthread ... -HI-FI電腦訊源（連載）&p=240563#post240563

Not listed on this page yet but here's the link to their site

http://toukiyakoneko.web.fc2.com/comple ... oduct.html

So far they compared 3 different USB cables and all of them seemed to sound identical

https://www.my-hiend.com/vbb/showthread ... -HI-FI電腦訊源（連載）&p=241408#post241408
Oyaide Continental 5S V2
Gore aerospace cable
Generic cable from one of those 100-yen shops

They even compared Daphile Dual PC setup (costing a million yen) to another cheap Windows 10 laptop with Celeron 1.7GHz processor and finally no differences could be heard whatsoever. We're aware that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but what could that "secret sauce" be? Maybe both McDualXO and McFIFO must be built right inside the DAC (or DDC) but let's wait and see then.

[tapatrick]

Maybe it's gonna sound like a heresy that might get me thrown under the bus, recently someone in Japan figured out how to implement both McDualXO as well as McFIFO from IanCanada inside his Jitter Free Sound Model DAC-7 and ALL effects of upstream components before the DAC could be nullified accordingly

http://toukiyakoneko.web.fc2.com/Jitter ... V1.0.0.pdf

They're asking for 600,000 yen to build that ES9038PRO-based DAC

https://www.my-hiend.com/vbb/showthread ... -HI-FI電腦訊源（連載）&p=240563#post240563

Not listed on this page yet but here's the link to their site

http://toukiyakoneko.web.fc2.com/comple ... oduct.html

So far they compared 3 different USB cables and all of them seemed to sound identical

https://www.my-hiend.com/vbb/showthread ... -HI-FI電腦訊源（連載）&p=241408#post241408
Oyaide Continental 5S V2
Gore aerospace cable
Generic cable from one of those 100-yen shops

They even compared Daphile Dual PC setup (costing a million yen) to another cheap Windows 10 laptop with Celeron 1.7GHz processor and finally no differences could be heard whatsoever. We're aware that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but what could that "secret sauce" be? Maybe both McDualXO and McFIFO must be built right inside the DAC (or DDC) but let's wait and see then.

Thats interesting, thanks for sharing [emoji106]


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