Hacking a DAC out of a CD player - has anyone done it?

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For those of us with limited budgets, a good DAC is out of our price range. On the other hand, it's common to see broken CD players with pretty good DACs in them.

Has anyone tried using the DAC from a CD player with an input from another source; say, a USB-> i2c or S/PDIF adapter?
 
So, is it possible?

I stumbled upon this old thread, but it raises a question I have often wondered about.

Is it possible to hack into the DAC of a reasonable quality player (say cambridge 650C) and feed it from a PC based music server?

I'd be betting that it is not possible as the DAC would be optimised for the CD datastream, but I am an ignoramus when it comes to digital so what do I know. Has anyone tried it?
 
I've speculated about doing this, and I have the board from a CD player sitting on my "kitchen" table. It's not from a premium player, but since a) I got it for 25 cents and b) it has separate digital filter (Yamaha) and ADC chips (AD) which c) I have docs for, and d) like the output opamps, they're all through-hole packages, it's a good place to start.

What it obviously lacks is the digital receiver chip; I happen to have a couple of the AD ASRC/digital receiver combo chips. They're surface mount, but comparatively large packages, so not too challenging compared with more recent devices.

A ready-made generic digital receiver board (since all current devices are surface mount), with jumper pads to configure the format, rate, etc, would be a useful building block for this kind of project.
 
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