ES9018 opinions. Can it beat the TDA1541?

[brubeck]

I contacted Mr Brown, what he has put together is not a DAC really. It can't accept Spdif AND it must slave the transport with its clock. So its basically a module to upgrade a CDP. A DAC has to stand on its own, no feed back of a high Mhz clock, sorry.

These days its just not practical (for me anyway) to use any thing but my computer with its 2TB of flacs. I would very much like to try the Brown module, but it needs a good asynch USB interface local to the clock. He has his flash memory transport but that would be a real hassle plus I just have never been a fan of cabling a masterclock, RFI transmittion and the resulting Jitter feeding a clock at those speed just isn't a jitter free solution IMHumble opinion. If Brown comes up with a USB solution I am all over it.

It's not without a reason that JB's DAC module only accept's I2S. SPDIF or other X>I2S conversion would decrease performance due jitter and distortion. I spend over years modding a HTPC with Juli@ soundcard. Imo a terrible dirty solution to drive a dac. Why not try a Squeezebox reciever as source? It takes just 4 wires from it get a I2S dac playing. You can stream the flac's from your pc to the SB device.

 

[erin]

Sarcasm, I hope?

Sarcasm I wish! Commercial products are targeted to a vastly different target customer than DIY. Sure $1200 is a lot of money for the DIY person. In the world of finished EMC approved products $1200 is not that much.

Its a pretty good DAC. It got me to sit up and take notice.

 

[regal]

It's not without a reason that JB's DAC module only accept's I2S. SPDIF or other X>I2S conversion would decrease performance due jitter and distortion. I spend over years modding a HTPC with Juli@ soundcard. Imo a terrible dirty solution to drive a dac. Why not try a Squeezebox reciever as source? It takes just 4 wires from it get a I2S dac playing. You can stream the flac's from your pc to the SB device.

Well unforunately my favorite band has a mastering engineer who uses the famous PM-2 ADC and uses HDCD encoding with peak extend. I have a TB of his work. So I need HDCD.exe (which is now a plugin for foobar and other software players) if I am to use a DAC without a PMD100. I'm not alone lots of folks want to take advantage of a computer using VST on raw recordings etc. So the Slim device and the sd players are a no-go for the future IMHO .

Now if the world was sensible there would be an Asynch USB-I2S converter for USB 1 or USB 2 up to 12MB/s where one can use galvanic isolation on the USB side. That would give one the ability to use a high quality clock with a super power supply and the MCLK could be used for all sorts of DIY DAC's.

Unfortunately all the new asynch USB implementations I'm seeing require 480M/s so their clocks share a ground with the computer and then they use jittery optoisolators after all the work is done. I realy want to build a modern NOS TDA1541A DAC, I guess I should start a new thread.

 

[clivem]

So I need HDCD.exe (which is now a plugin for foobar and other software players) if I am to use a DAC without a PMD100. So the Slim device and the sd players are a no-go for the future IMHO .

On-the-fly HDCD *and* CD deemphasis

 

[Luke]

I realy want to build a modern NOS TDA1541A DAC, I guess I should start a new thread.

I guess you could try an ebay kit, I'm not sure but I expect some of them are good quality. May need some research.