Here's a ten discrete tone test waveform played back into my Sony PCM-M10 then FFT'd in Audacity with 512point FFT.

Audacity reports lower freq tones at -18.6dB and the highest (17.3kHz) at -18.9dB - a droop of 0.3dB. This might be in part my passive (LC) reconstruction filter which I have yet to characterize separately. So it appears to work

Having been a fan of NOS DACs now for something over a year I've decided it was high time for sorting out their most serious drawback - the roll off in the HF. This is an unavoidable result of using a zero-order hold function to reconstruct the original (impulse) samples. Droop exists even with oversampled DACs, its just at its most severe in NOS.

One of the most popular ways to flatten the response is to add on some kind of analog filter with a rising response (to 3.16dB @ 20kHz). A first order shelving filter can't quite cut it though so an LC tank circuit has been employed by a few. This needs to have a moderately high Q to achieve the correction.

I've played around with inductors to achieve this and haven't much liked the resulting sound. Whether this was due to the particular inductors I was using I didn't experiment. Admittedly they were very cheap ones. In general though when I've used high Q circuits in crossovers I haven't much liked the colouration...

Its been over a year since I blogged about DACs, so, long overdue, here's an update. I've abandoned my considerable development on the AD1955 because I found something that's more interesting - multibit. In the first instance - NOS.

A while back I bought a TDA1543 NOS DAC to play with, just to see what all the fuss was about with NOS. Plenty of people have waxed lyrical about the sound. At first listen, I wasn't impressed although it had a certain tonal richness in portraying orchestral instruments that was alluring. Bottom line - its soundstage was compressed front to back. This made it sound a little 'forward' - foreground instruments and voices were more highlighted compared to acoustic spaces ('background').

A second aspect which plagues pretty much all NOS DACs is their frequency response can hardly be termed 'accurate' - owing to the sinc function of first-order hold, they exhibit a significant HF roll-off which begins around 5kHz and reaches 3.2dB...

Here's a pic of the underside of the DAC before I started hacking tracks. Bottom left area is where the digital circuits are, with ground plane. Top left are the analogue output filters. Right is the caps, rectifiers and regs of the power supplies - digital at the bottom and analogue at the top.

The AD1955 sits about the centre of this pic, and if you look closely you'll notice two small holes I drilled in the groundplane either side of it where I will later install the 10uF decouplers.

The second pic shows the component side, prior to any hacks - the 'virgin board' if you like, although sullied by the two small holes near the DAC chip. The analog supply is pin15, that's at top left.

Third, here's the meat of the digital circuitry and I've already added one decoupler to the AVDD (analogue positive supply). To the right of the 24.576 XTAL (not required) is the DIR9001 SPDIF receiver. The DIL chip is a multiplexer allowing both USB and SPDIF input...

Doug Self's comprehensive work on power amplifiers has been an inspiration to me over a number of years. In it, he coined the notion of the 'blameless amp' as one which was beyond reproach, measurements-wise. So I pondered over running with the notion of 'blameless DAC' along the same lines. Initially this sounded attractive, even though not entirely original. Google found a reference to it already here on diyaudio but could not show me the actual posting.

I decided on reflection that the 'blameless DAC' would be not such a good idea. That's partly because for me, measurements are not the goal of audio design. Enjoyable sound is what does it for me, not vanishingly low THD figures. So a 'blameless DAC' could only be blameless if measurements are God, so to speak. For someone like me for whom auditory experience is all, I decided I'd need another term for my DAC project.

I've settled instead on the term 'highly evolved converter' or HEC for short. This recognises...