Holly Grail DAC

[Van Hai]

Dear All,

I have search and wanted to build a Holly Grail DAC, but some of you may think the Holly Grail DAC is No DAC. Just goto the concert or Oprera Hall. What i mean is the very best way to reproduce the sound of nature in term of art and science.

Let say the art is analog and the science is digital, DAC and I/V, my thinking very simple not to much components, no safety, no color and so on added to the sound, like you want the best you need to pay, nothing last forever, just good care and love add in passion thing will last longer.

For Digital part we need to be able to program the Hex code so that we can change the way the digital behave depend on your sound system you have or whatever i do not know at this time.

For I/V analog part my goodness there were so many thing from opamp, fet, transister, tube to capacitor all of which will effect the sound and willing to experiment.

I would welcome any suguession you may have, also i have been build quite a number of dac from battery to power supply, seem i have not found what i been look for.

Let start with CS8414, TDA1541A and a lot of flash ram i am ready please lead me the way.

Thanks All
Van Hai

[wa2ise]

Ideally, the DAC box should have the master clock oscillator. That would avoid the jitter issues one gets when the external DAC box is slaved off the transport box. Alternatively, the transport's master clock oscillator could feed a line driver to feed a second coax cable that would directly feed the DAC box. The common goal here is to avoid running the DAC chip off a PLL output. The transport circuits could have a jittery system clock and the digital signal "pixels" won't care. It's when you hit the DAC chip and the analog world jitter rears its ugly head. Thus the DAC gets the master clock, and everything else can have the jittery clocks. The DAC chip's input latch, run off the master jitter free clock, effectively retimes the "pixels" and acts as a buffer from the jittery world to jitter free world. This assumes that jitter never gets worse than say 10% of the clock cycle time.

Take a look at my web page on analog circuits at DACs using tubes and such.

[jcx]

why claim you're pursuing the ultimate when you aren't even close to the leading edge in technology...

for the potential for building real 24-bit audio dacs & adcs:

http://www.hypres.com/ >technology>data converters