Adding Digital Input to CD Player -> low cost DAC for PC

[Brent Welke]

What would be the basic process to add a coax spidf input to a CD player? Is there a spidf signal between the transport and the player's DAC? If not then is it simple to convert the spidf signal into the format the transport uses and route that into the player's DAC?

This could be an inexpensive way to have a quality DAC for a PC.

Extra jitter may be introduced by the computer generating the digital signal, but it would be easy to test it against the CD player and know how well it works or when you get it right.

If anyone has added a digital input to a CD player I would be interested in following your lead. Or if you think this is not a good idea please let me know, and why.

By the way I have "bit perfect" digital audio coming from my computer using a Chaintech sound card that I bought for $30 US and I play losses audio files. The "bit perfect" test is to send a DTS signal to a DTS decoder and have it decode.

I recently compared my TDA1543 DAC to a >$100 DVD player and was surprised the DVD player was as good in most regards, different but good. The TDA1543 only does 44.1 Khz and inexpensive players do it all these days.

I think it would be neat trick to use an inexpensive CD/DVD player as a PC's DAC. For starters you wouldn't always need the PC because you could burn losses files to a CD or DVD.

I have tried an Audigy2 sound card as the DAC but it does not compare to a TDA1543 DAC or even a $100 Toshiba DVD player.

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Cheers,
Brent

[rfbrw]

You would need the pinout of the dac chip at the very least. You would also need a SPDIF receiver and a method of switching between the two sources and that can range from relays to the glitchless switching found in studios and the like.