I just received my Wolfson 4.0 BIY DAC :)

[marchel]

Yes it is a Buy it yourself Dac,

I bought it off ebay, It is a assembled dac consisting of 4, yes 4 wolfson wm4870.

I just wanna upgrade the sound of my cd players, I did'nt expect it would sound this good.

The stock Opamps are opa134, And I dont think it is that bad, But I just ordered six ad797 to replace them , To see what the differences are.

But in stock form , This dac sounds very good, very detailed,very transparent, very musical and very involving, Only needs a very very tiny bit of refinement or smoothness.

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[SoNic_real_one]

The DAC part number is WM8740
Looks very nice. Yep, the OpAmps could be better, that's why there are on sockets. I guess it is wanted to give you something to tinker with

[olblueyez]

Post me a link Bro. Looks nice and wish it were me rolling chips, sounds like fun. How much?

[marchel]

Hi , Here is the link to the store. $239- only

I should be receiving the ad797 IC this monday, I can't wait. But this dac is really good sounding as-is.



raindrop hui, Electronics, Cameras Photo items. Great deals on eBay!

[lordearl]

Awesome!! Mine should arrive soon, I ordered OPA627 - 6 of them, pricey little buggers!

How is the USB input?

[marchel]

I'm sorry to say that I haven't tried the USB input yet , As I'm still looking for a replacement for my dead laptop.

Before I received this dac, I was thinking of replacing the analog stage with balanced to unbalanced transformer and a pass B1 buffer, In fact I already have the B1 on ready, and I was ready to buy transformer too, I was looking deeply into this ebay site for transformers, eBay Philippines Seller: tube6361: Cameras Photo, Consumer Electronics items on eBay.ph

But then the dac arrive, I was really surprised by the high sound quality, That the thoughts of using transformer and buffer, simply vanished. I was taken to audio nirvana at first listen with one of my dvd player that sounds good with this dac ( maybe my other disc player have jitter problems, I'm not sure, But I swear there is difference in sound quality).

In my views, I think this DAC or the designer of this Dac have a "What if" mentality, I mean , How many commercial dac or high end cdplayer use 4 wolfson chip, And how much would they cost? I think this is dac crazy and fun

[lordearl]

hhaha yes, true! One reason I bought this was because of the design, 4 DAC chips and 6 single opamps...quite unique.

How come there is no input selector? Does it automatically choose the input?

OK I will report on the USB quality (I can compare with my Musiland 01 USD).

[marchel]

It will automatically select the input, I tried.

[qusp]

be prepared to change the circuit a little to accommodate the AD797, they are very picky and will often oscillate if you do not add some bandwidth limiting. fantastic opamp, seriously good and i'm a massive fan!! but it needs to be treated well I prefer it to 627/637, but yeah its so fast and such wide bandwidth that stooping to the comparatively low level required by the audio band, can create issues.

this dac though, how do they effectively pull output from 4 balanced dac chips with only 6 single channel opamps? seems strange to me and would think that they would not be taking advantage of the capabilities of the chips. or are there some 4 channel opamps for 2 or 4? like THS4032 or OPA1632? tis odd indeed

hang on, just looked at the PCB briefly and i'm a bit confused, they have set the dacs in mono mode I guess, but are they using both phases? modders...ready....GO!!!

[lordearl]

don't know why the unit is stuctured like that...I asked the seller about the best opamp upgrade and he suggested 627. Marchel, let us know of your AD797 impressions when the chips arrive, I'll do the same re the 627.