Because I found it to make the most sense engineering wise. What do you think of it? Will I be able to successfully power it with a 12v wall wart (acceptable sound)?
HIFI Philips Little Giant TDA1387 decoder
HIFI Philips Little Giant TDA1387 decoder
5.5x2.1 is commonly used to power external hard drives and scanners, so you may have a few of those around already, or can find one at a thrift store. Those are always center positive, but I'd double check the polarity just in case. It looks like there's a TO220 5V regulator on board, so not much point in using an external linear regulator, unless you really want to. (I was thinking 15 to 19V power brick regulated down to 12V with an LTsomething or discrete regulator.) Or you could just have some passive RLC filtering in case of any dirt from the switching supply.
From a Micromega Stage 3 with twin TDA1305T's to this. It might be what is needed but the immediate response was to remember Colonel Kurtz's last words.
While TDA1387 can be OK, this exact device certainly not makes most sense engineering wise. Maybe it helps to predefine what you expect from a DAC.
Some hints. You could put attention to jitter and therefor a low jitter receiver and/or a mechanism to overcome jitter issues. Also high res and possibly DSD as high res is already standard today at various sources. A high res capable DAC is downwards compatible with 16/44.1 material. A built in power supply would be nice instead of another adapter. USB input may be nice for the future audio player that might enter your home one day. The DAC should be better in terms of performance than the internal ones of your sources. Things like that. Low price is the worst to start with.
If you assume beforehand that you "don't need a DAC that screws up sound as most commercial units do" then this one very likely is not the right one either. You enter the emotions arena then and not much "digital" can be OK.
And eh... building a better DAC board into a device often brings best results. No SPDIF or USB conversions, no external device, no extra PSU, no extra footprint, no extra adapter or power cable. That requires cohones and skills but you'll get Zen!
Some hints. You could put attention to jitter and therefor a low jitter receiver and/or a mechanism to overcome jitter issues. Also high res and possibly DSD as high res is already standard today at various sources. A high res capable DAC is downwards compatible with 16/44.1 material. A built in power supply would be nice instead of another adapter. USB input may be nice for the future audio player that might enter your home one day. The DAC should be better in terms of performance than the internal ones of your sources. Things like that. Low price is the worst to start with.
If you assume beforehand that you "don't need a DAC that screws up sound as most commercial units do" then this one very likely is not the right one either. You enter the emotions arena then and not much "digital" can be OK.
And eh... building a better DAC board into a device often brings best results. No SPDIF or USB conversions, no external device, no extra PSU, no extra footprint, no extra adapter or power cable. That requires cohones and skills but you'll get Zen!
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OK. This dac makes sense because it has no digital filter, which is the real secret difference of NOS sound. The dac chip has a master clock and continuous calibration (I don't know that an outboard clock would really be needed in such a simple implementation).
This dac also has power supply filtering and regulation. It also employs a variant of the Pass i/v stage, plus filtering of the coaxial input.
It appears to be a sound design given its simplicity, and it supports up to 192khz oversampling.
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Have you considered why the Pass I/V works well in the Pass DAC but will not necessarily do so with a NOS TDA1387 ?
The 1387 requires an I/V stage to perform its best. According to the designer, the variant suites the chip in question.