If your player is still virgin, there are plenty of freebie mods that will lift the player
Personally, i'd bypass the output caps (elna silmic accross the back near the output phono's) and the output muting transistors first. You'd take the output from the HDAM direct to the phono out. I'd not remove the HDAM until i'd changed the output opamps to something like LM4562MA (or LME47920HA) and got some decent decouling caps on there (Rubycon ZA or similar @220uF). This upgrade will cost less than £20 possibly less in the UK.
The best single improvement for this player would be to get a seperate low noise reg on the analogue dac. This means isolating the supply (which can be done by lifting a wire link on the PCB) and giving the analogue supply to the DAC its own reg. I'd also replace the 4 decoupling caps on the DAC with somethin similar to the above at the same time. This upgrade would cost somewhere around £50.
Then i'd go for a clock
In this player, you can clock both the DAC and the servo. Given that the servo run's at half the clock speed (16.934Mhz/8.46Mhz) I'd make sure you have a clock capable of putting out both for best VFM. Although Burson opamps are awesome, they don't make the best VFM clocks imho.With a few caps, opamps, analogue DAC reg and clock on dac/servo and the HDAM, DC blocking caps & muting transistors bypassed you will have a player that will beat any new £1000 player
Check out the list in the first couple of pages. Ray lists the components for much more detailed upgrades in the various areas.
That should be enough for information overload
Ian
Sorry to disagree a little Ian but I think the one single mod that's most important is regulating the servo driver op-amps. The easiest way is to buy 3 x 7808 and 3 x 7908 and install them directly on the board near the chips powered from the original +-10V rails. Low dropout regs would be a wise choice. The improvement in smoothness and bass quality is very significant indeed. The cost is negligible.
Totally agree the DAC analogue rail is pretty important too, but perhaps slightly less important.
Simon
Totally agree the DAC analogue rail is pretty important too, but perhaps slightly less important.
Simon
Once I did put this drwaing for a french forum, if that may help someone... Obbligato MKPs are perfect here... as icing on the cake...
http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/6784/image3icn.png
http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/6784/image3icn.png
My only issue is that this mod is not proved to work in every case (so I am led to believe), maybe due to the voltage headroom????. As you say, they'd need to be LDO. Personally I cannot comment because I've never tried it (although I did buy the regs to do it ages ago!!).
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