DAC?
March 22, 2007
Can any of you recommend a decent DAC for me? I want to convert TOSLINK and S/PDIF to something I can feed into my NAD receiver to drive a decent set of stereo speakers. It doesn’t have to be something great, but not crap either.
I’ll be using an external switch to select devices, so it only needs a single optical and coaxial input. I guess it could even just have a coaxial input and I could just get an optical to coax adapter.
Even a schematic for a known-high-quality adapter would work, I could just build one.
just jam the wires together. should work fine.
Do you, Mr I-haven’t-added-scott’s-wii-number-yet, know whether the wii supports surround-sound? I saw on the zelda intro that it supports dolby digital, but I didn’t see if it was DDS. I can’t seem to find any adapters for it, either.
Doh. That’s what I forgot to do last night… I did end up playing a bunch of Cooking Mama Cook Off, though.
It supports Dolby Surround, but it’s just normal surround encoded over the two channels. It’s not actually digital out.
Beh! I want fiber! heh.
Lucy says she made lasagna and borscht last night, via CMCO.
Anything from here will be very high quality.
Er… I think that’s a little more than I’m wanting to spend. I just want a pair of decent floor-standing speakers which don’t require a sub for basic TV / movie viewing, and I figure my NAD receiver could power them quite nicely. Then I’d just use an external switch for the various game / TV systems and a DAC to feed the NAD receiver.
M-Audio used to make really decent dedicated DACs, can’t find any on their site any more. See if you can’t find plans for a board based around a dCS DAC chip, they make the best there is.
Flying Cow is the one. We use a lot of those at Dolby, even in testing situations. They’re nothing special, but there’s nothing wrong with them. You could probably pick one up on eBay for not too much, though the only one listed now has a starting bid of $225 which is way too much. Look around though.
If you want to do it yourself, get DACs made by Asahi Kasei. They are perfectionists. I know this because I test their stuff all the time and they always match specs and references exactly. I’m pretty sure their DACs and ADCs are used in a lot of high end sound cards.
Thanks. :) That one looks pretty nifty… The only thing which would make it better is automatic switching between optical and coax inputs, or dual auto-switching coax inputs.
Do you happen to know of specific part numbers? I’d imagine they have some reference schematics I could work from too…
Listen to the tester from Dolby, that’s a hell of a lot better qualification than “I read hi-fi equipment a lot”.
Any of these will do, as far as I know.
http://www.asahi-kasei.co.jp/akm/en/product/audio.html
But I can’t speak for specific DACs. I almost exclusively test their DSP products that have Dolby code running on them. Almost all of the work I do is in the digital domain.
The text fixture on my bench right now uses an AK4359 8 channel DAC for the output and and a JRC5532 op amp for each stereo pair output (7.1 channel fixture).
This deconstruction of an m-audio sound card might lend some insight to making a high quality board using AKM and JRC parts.
But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. I just happen to know that this way works and works well.
Hmm, thanks. That’s interesting. I was also looking at these cheesy little things with Crystal DACs and thinking that they might do what I want.
(My final goal is a simple two-channel setup to place next to a flat screen TV with a single, simple input switch. I figured I could easily piggyback off the excellent NAD receiver / amp I already have with a DAC and better quality input switch.)
I can’t speak for the quality of Crystal’s DACs, but one of my coworkers used to work for them before they got bought by Cirrus. He’s told me that their products’ quality has eroded since then, but that’s mostly in the DSP processing area, not their DACs.
These days, just about anybody is going to make a decent DAC, but some will of course be better than others.
But for $30, how can you go wrong?
I think I might give it a go… It’s small enough to easily be mounted inside the receiver, and it’d be real simple to bang together a LM7805 & LM7905 power supply off of whatever I find inside the chassis.
Oh, and you’ll need a S/PDIF receiver like an AKM114.
Make that AK4114, not AKM114. My fingers do not respond to my commands today.
Oh, whoops. Replied to the wrong commend.
Gah, “comment”
Muy retardo today.
Hehe, you said ‘nad’. *snigger*
So what kind of DAW do you use on your computer?
I’m confused by your question. DAW normally means Digital Audio Workstation, which a computer is frequently part of.
That said, for the poking around with music stuff that I do, I try not to use a computer.