Has anyone used their CD player as a DAC?
I'm barely able to hold a screwdriver the right way round, but would like to put a soundcard in my pc with digital out, and take that to my separates system. It would let me keep my Arcam 8r a few more years, while getting better sound from my PC. I looked at the Arcam drawings, and found a philips drive, which talks philips? and as it heads to my dac it passes a digital out socket that's behind an isolating transformer. It almost looks like I could plug in a digital line that talks philips, and it would work. Only it's not a 1:1 Transformer and there are a couple of caps involved that are likely just noise related.
Now I half expect readers to me turning over I2C in their minds, but the only bus I know goes to town. So all my brain is going to manage here is if philips language is ever going to come from my PC. Also, if my CD players clock would need the incoming data to share the timing signal, which will also stop me.
Has anyone took an older (£200) CD player and taken an external signal into it? I would like a read of that. I'm not ready for multi room, or networks, or cd players with internet. I'm not even ready for surround sound and hdcd is still in my future, not the past. I would like my Arcam players tone and quality when playing from the PC though, if it's not a big deal.
Just buy an 8200? It's £350 I would rather keep if possible.
I'm barely able to hold a screwdriver the right way round, but would like to put a soundcard in my pc with digital out, and take that to my separates system. It would let me keep my Arcam 8r a few more years, while getting better sound from my PC. I looked at the Arcam drawings, and found a philips drive, which talks philips? and as it heads to my dac it passes a digital out socket that's behind an isolating transformer. It almost looks like I could plug in a digital line that talks philips, and it would work. Only it's not a 1:1 Transformer and there are a couple of caps involved that are likely just noise related.
Now I half expect readers to me turning over I2C in their minds, but the only bus I know goes to town. So all my brain is going to manage here is if philips language is ever going to come from my PC. Also, if my CD players clock would need the incoming data to share the timing signal, which will also stop me.
Has anyone took an older (£200) CD player and taken an external signal into it? I would like a read of that. I'm not ready for multi room, or networks, or cd players with internet. I'm not even ready for surround sound and hdcd is still in my future, not the past. I would like my Arcam players tone and quality when playing from the PC though, if it's not a big deal.
Just buy an 8200? It's £350 I would rather keep if possible.
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I would like to add this to my player. Or one of similar standing perhaps. I don't want it to stop spinning disks, I want it to gain an input.
I wasn't sure if this might of been done, of if someone might look art this and offer some insight regarding the timing or language problems. I'm pretty sure my dac is awaiting data all the time, rather than only after I hit play. My external dac seems happy to decode a stream without the boxs having a common clock so I'm sure it's unfounded. I guess I will pull a sample from between my transport and board and feed it my external dac to see, if nobody advises against it
I wasn't sure if this might of been done, of if someone might look art this and offer some insight regarding the timing or language problems. I'm pretty sure my dac is awaiting data all the time, rather than only after I hit play. My external dac seems happy to decode a stream without the boxs having a common clock so I'm sure it's unfounded. I guess I will pull a sample from between my transport and board and feed it my external dac to see, if nobody advises against it
I reckon your best option to convert your CD player to a DAC is by means of an async USB interface. The reason being - both a CD player's DAC section and an async USB DAC act as clock masters. If you went for S/PDIF (or AES-EBU which is pretty much the same) that's a clock slave.
You'd be wanting either an XMOS or a CM6631A USB-I2S interface board. I'd go for the latter myself as I think its less of a noise generator. This kind of thing : ???CM6631A????? I2S SPDIF??384kHz-???
You'd be wanting either an XMOS or a CM6631A USB-I2S interface board. I'd go for the latter myself as I think its less of a noise generator. This kind of thing : ???CM6631A????? I2S SPDIF??384kHz-???
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I've seen a few schematics for CD players with inputs and it is not uninvolved. I would seriously consider the Audiolab, unless this is the kind of thing you can do with ease.
Thank you for your decisive post. I learnt a lot from that. This looks the cheapest way I can get the data from my PC, with no timing issues.
Is it just the audio data like a CD drive would produce? My CD player is an Arcam, and uses just a typical drive, often cloned for $20
This looks far too easy at the moment. I must be missing something.
You could simply buy a Dac. I don't know if they sound the same, but I got a Muse TDA1543 x4 (4 Dac chips in NOS mode) secondhand for £15. Sounds nice and natural and is tiny.
I have a little £3.50 dac like that, but my PC doesn't have a digital out. So this route means a new sound card. I don't mind a new card to get digital info my CD play could resolve as I know it's sound. However a new card for a new box is a route to unknown audio quality. I might be better to just get a new card and use it's own analogue stages.
To be honest, I have a fairly compact Dell PC and might have no slots and half height cards are a certainty. So pulling out a digital signal might be my only option.
My heads swimming. I fancy that £10 board though, and could trial it on my £3.50 dac before operating on my Arcam.
I'm very much a newbie to this kind of stuff. My Arcam got fried in a power surge recently though, which has chucked me in at the deep end. So I'm leaning.
When you say 'CD drive' do you mean the CD transport mechanism? If so, I don't know I've never dived that far into CD player internals.
I suspect you may be missing something - you will need a way to get the clock from the USB interface board to your CD player's master clock oscillator. In the old days that oscillator was inside the SAA7220 and ran from an 11.2896MHz XTAL. The clocks on the CM6631A board won't give that 11MHz signal directly - on the variant I have the 44k1 family rates are taken from a 45.152MHz osc module. So that will need a divide-by-4 circuit to derive an 11MHz master clock. If your player isn't using SAA7220 then it may well have another frequency of XTAL but it'll have to be some multiple of 44k1.
I suspect you may be missing something - you will need a way to get the clock from the USB interface board to your CD player's master clock oscillator. In the old days that oscillator was inside the SAA7220 and ran from an 11.2896MHz XTAL. The clocks on the CM6631A board won't give that 11MHz signal directly - on the variant I have the 44k1 family rates are taken from a 45.152MHz osc module. So that will need a divide-by-4 circuit to derive an 11MHz master clock. If your player isn't using SAA7220 then it may well have another frequency of XTAL but it'll have to be some multiple of 44k1.
Be very interesting to see such drawings. It seems to add a conventional input, the player must be the clock. Making what looks like a directional connection, a two way street. That would stop me in my tracks. I need to go back to my drawings to see that the Philips drive has it's own clock. There are clk labels on the plugs I think, so maybe not.. My external dac is happy to take an unmodified sample of it's data line though, and nothing else. So maybe my internal dac will. Which does live on it's own board, allowing slightly better visualisation of whats going on, and a clear path for pushing wires where wires were never meant to be pushed
Oh bugger. I said Philips didn't I. I thought Sony was as common as it gets? My £3.50 dac has no problem with just a data signal from it.
I have literally just fixed the Player actually, after quite a learning curve, which is why I fancied digging in deeper.
So it's not I2C my dac board is waiting for? I'm surprised my £3.50 job managed if that's the case. That is literally $5 new.
I have literally just fixed the Player actually, after quite a learning curve, which is why I fancied digging in deeper.
So it's not I2C my dac board is waiting for? I'm surprised my £3.50 job managed if that's the case. That is literally $5 new.
Using parts already assembled, it looks like I need a usb input. If I take in anything else in, I will need to get custom with picking up the timing. Taking in usb I can use a cheap board and link it with my cd players clocks. Using a switch(relay) to go between mechanism or usb input when the cd motor spins.
This is the shallow end for diyaudio.
This is the shallow end for diyaudio.
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