AK4524 any good ?

[Bernhard]

Hi,

I have a board from a dead Yamaha CD recorder, containing this AK4524, input/output stage and voltage regulators.

Any experience with this chip ?

[emuman100]

The Roady 2 XM Satellite Radio has a D/A from AKM. It sounds decent. I prefer the sound from a CS43122. I'm going to build a DAC with a Wolfson Microelectronics WM8711, which is in the SkyFi 2. It's low power, and has an integrated headphone driver, but the only drawback is that it's completely software controlled, though the software is free on Wolfson's site, and the parallel port interface is easy to accomplish. You can even buy directly from their site or order samples. Everything you need to know is in the datasheet and evaluation board manual. The evaluation board is $140, so pretty cheap compaired to others. I plan on making a final product that is small, tiny, and can be driven on a battery. The reason for this is because at night, I don't want to be tethered to a big amplifier/DAC when I'm listening with headphones. I want a tiny, small, battery powered unit that i can plug in my headphones and plug in some S/PDIF source, either from a decent CD player, a satellite tv receiver, or an XM radio receiver that is remote controlled. The D/A converter also has analog inputs, as one of it's applications is for a multi-source audio device, like an am/fm radio and mp3 player. I will add those as analog audio inputs, if you want to listen to say XM radio and AM/FM, you can with a simple switch. Since it's uC controlled, buttons will be used to change sources and volume. The S/PDIF receiver will be low power and easy to use too. I'm not sure which clock to use, but the S/PDIF receiver has to be an automatic sample rate converter too. I have big hopes for this project, as the code won't be very difficult at all, compaired to my STA310 multiochannel decoder project which got put on the back burner due to lack of money and programming skills. I have so many ideas, but since I only did 8051 asm in school and never really found it that easy, it's a little difficult for me. Since pc software can control the WM8711, I can get the hardware part working and I can test it and see it work, then i could start on a PIC project to control it.

[sgrossklass]

The AK4524 was quite popular as DAC on semipro soundcards in 2001/2002, e.g. Terratec DMX 6Fire. No longer top end today but still pretty good (the specs are better than for, say, the NPC SM5864).