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Abbado II NOS DAC kits

Thanks for the schem Richard. (y)

The boards are done, really enjoyed these. I find SMD work very therapeutic, bit of music, goggles on, head down....

Those filter inductors are works of art mate, fair play, hell of a nice kit.

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Finally got the PSU together, everything is working fine. The PSU board was designed by Prasi for my needs and uses DEXA discrete regs by NewClassD of Denmark.
I will be using Meldano's Muses volume control with this DAC in balanced mode, so a DAC / preamp eventually.

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@abraxalito can I check - on the Amanero USB module, does MCLK or FSCLK correspond to LRCK on the DAC?

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@abraxalito - She sings my friend. What a lovely sounding DAC, very impressive indeed. It has real meat on it's bones, the lower frequencies are very full with noticeable punch, plenty of space and detail everywhere. It handles the decay of notes very well.
The output at 6db is very high so I may swap the resistor to 0db setting. It is without any attenuation yet just through Windows and Foobar volume controls.

My normal DAC is a Sabaj D5 with ESS Sabre 9038 chip, a very nice sounding DAC, the Sabre is a good all round DAC for sure. The Delta Sigma algorithms definitely shape the music in a pleasant way, initially it may have the edge on upper frequency details but I'm still re-learning the new sound. The Abbado certainly is more organic, less forced. After a few hours of listening to everything including films and podcasts, there is no fatigue at all.

Now there was a problem - initially I hooked both boards up with the splitter and listened to each board individually as single ended, just to check them before adding the muses and drilling holes in panels etc.

First board played music but I noticed some crackling from left speaker, so powered down, swapped output connection between DAC boards and listened and all was well, no crackling - so I swapped to the first board again and got a horrific loud distortion. I had a feeling that the splitter might be the issue, so tried both boards individually without the splitter and they both sound excellent.

I will hook the splitter up again later, possibly powering down and swapping the boards separately did something to the phase inversion. The real acid test is though my balanced headphone amp.

Oh - what do the trimmers do, and where do I measure?
 
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@passive420 I am visiting friends and family in UK at present (I think not a great distance away from you) so it'll be another week before I'm able to look deeper into the issue you are having with the splitter from your Amanero. Does it put out bitclock at 64fs (2.8MHz for 44.1k)?

Trimmers are so you can match levels L/R when running balanced with the splitter. To set up you need a test tone playing (I use 400Hz) and a DVM on ACV range. Use one or other of the trimmers to get a close match in the output levels. But if your splitter has somehow developed a malfunction that isn't going to be possible.

Thanks very much for the feedback on SQ. The 6dB setting is actually -6dB for using in balanced so 0dB will be 2X the output level. If -6dB still turns out to be too high level for you there are resistors that can be tweaked to lower it further but doing the calculations for those will have to wait until I'm back in China again.
 
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The TDA1545A DAC chips themselves can accept 8X oversampled data but that would need to be supplied with an I2S BCK set to 32fs (12.288MHz). The normal I2S BCK is 64fs and that's above the maximum BCK for the DAC chips.

If that's a bit technical for you the answer is 'its beyond chip spec' with your XMOS card at 384k, 'yes' at 192k. 384k has to be worth a try though so I'll look into getting a 384k capable USB card.