I had a quick look at your photos.... the wiring leaves a lot to be desired.... one obvious mistake is to feed mains cable to all the transformers in parallel with the switch digital-in selector cable...this will feed huge amount of noise in to digital section… with so many little boards / modules everywhere, it is paramount to keep connections as close as possible, so stacking those modules is not bad idea…. in particular it is important to use very thick and short ground connections - silver ribbons are good… what you really want to do here is re-establish single low noise ground plane environment for all those scattered modules… try to use anything BUT litz (multistrand) interconnect wiring.
Cheers,
Boky
LOL, look a bit better: It isn't finished - the link says "work in progress" remember? If you look you see a lot of room on one side of the chassis. There's also an unconnected transformer. This is for the future addition of another PSU, either a Placid or LCDPS depending on what is needed for the additional modules. As a result, the lay-out isn't final and neither is the wiring. I'm still waiting for quite a bit of parts that aren't launched yet (USB, AC/femto).
Also the picture shows no depth. The wires are 8cm apart. Plus it's twisted wire, and in the end it'll likely even be (double) shielded plus a lot shorter. So there's very little that can go wrong. Even now there's no problem.
About the silver: I'm not a fan of silver wiring. This build is purely copper based, and it'll likely stay that way. That's one of the pleasures of DIY: I can do it the way I like best, and you're free to do it your way. For now I've used cheap wiring on the inside, I don't see any need for high-end wiring in the current phase of this build. It's something I might do when it's final, but surely not now.
What does worry me a bit is that in all those months not ONE person has seen the very obvious problem in the amp... Luckily I did see it right away when checking it.
I've tried to help. Seems to me that you know best, so good luck in reaching that audio nirvana.
Boky
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Believe me, it's appreciated. And no, I don't know best. From that single picture you simply can't see everything. There are quite a bit of potential problems ahead. I'm quite worried about the distance between the I2S ports on the 2 DAC boards. I think it'll become a problem when I increase the bitrate. This will occur as soon as the USB module is available. I may have to rearrange everything to get the DAC boards closer to the Mux/USB module (I intend to stack those on top of each other). But not knowing exact dimensions or lay-out of the new module made that impossible. So instead I bolted everything down as-is just hoping everything will work when it's finished. And if it doesn't I'll have to order a new chassis panel.
Guess what?
I finally got the opportunity to purchase the BII boards but the trident boards were sold out, so I had to cancel the order.
I am not having much luck.
I have been trying to purchase this stuff since November, but for some reason I always miss out.
Anyway it is good to see your progress LeonvB
I finally got the opportunity to purchase the BII boards but the trident boards were sold out, so I had to cancel the order.
I am not having much luck.
I have been trying to purchase this stuff since November, but for some reason I always miss out.
Anyway it is good to see your progress LeonvB
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That's a case of very bad luck. I'd have mailed Brain to add them to the order as soon as they're available instead of cancelling the whole order. Most of the time he can fix things in the ordering process, he helped me with quite some things.
I must admit I'm getting frustrated by the lack of progress. I've been waiting for years for the AC1/femto to be available. Right now I'm considering getting an arduino based setup like glt made instead. I've even considered the new Beagleboard Xm as that also has I2S output, so I can use it as a controller/streamer in one go. The new USB module however would also let me use the DAC as a soundcard on the PC, enabling more flexible use.
What I'm not sorry about is building the DAC even though I knew I couldn't finish it. It's simply a wonderful sounding piece of equipment. Mine sees almost daily use. If you have to build it without Tridents, please do. Even without them it's way better than most DACs.
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