Stand alone sabre DAC I/V stage?

[kimschips]

Hi

Do you know where you can buy separate IV board for ES9018/28/38 for opamps?
I want to test some different things without buying expensive boards from twisted pear audio or lcaudio.

Thanks for your inputs.

 

[Markw4]

You can diy an I/V board, but it can be a fair amount of work to do well.

 

[johnmarkp]

Check out DIYINHK.

 

[chromenuts]

Would Ian’s boards not work? He offers 9028-38 hat boards for his FIFO...

DocumentDownload/README.md at master * iancanada/DocumentDownload * GitHub

It’s offered populated or not...also a transformer stage available

 

[Markw4]

Would Ian’s boards not work?

Ian's output stage board not without problems, already summarized in other threads. FIFO_Pi is very good though. But it doesn't mean every other project turned out as well.

Also, in response to another poster, diyinhk is not much good from what I have seen of their products so far. Haven't seen a standalone I/V output stage from them though.

 

[kimschips]

Ian's output stage board not without problems, already summarized in other threads. FIFO_Pi is very good though. But it doesn't mean every other project turned out as well.

Also, in response to another poster, diyinhk is not much good from what I have seen of their products so far. Haven't seen a standalone I/V output stage from them though.

Thanks
I think diyinhk make fine products I have their Xmos xu216 isolated board it has crystal clear sound. I have connected adm7150 psu + another for USB side, works great.

I have thought about their ES9028 Dac PCB cost only 15$ without components, could be fine for DIY testing😊

 

[Markw4]

Thanks
I think diyinhk make fine products I have their Xmos xu216 isolated board it has crystal clear sound.

I also have one of their USB boards, don't remember which model, but it was their top of the line stereo version. When tested against other USB boards it exhibited more audible jitter than, say, JL Sounds I2SoverUSB. Eventually decided the diyinhk board was beyond redemption for my purposes.

Also have one of their ES9028PRO dac boards. It is two a two layer board with insufficient ground plane. No way to make it perform near as well as ES9028PRO should be able to do as a result of layout, insufficient layers for high performance dac, and ground plane issues.

Oh, well. I chalk it up to experience. Money down the drain, at least there were some data points taken.

 

[kimschips]

Yeah everything has it price.
It's a bit pity that 'audiodesine' do not exist anymore they made great Dac and it comes with all the audiohile things installed.
Do you know of a fair price for ES9028 which also possible to modify?
Thx

 

[Markw4]

Unfortunately, I don't know of an ES9028PRO board that I would want to modify. Maybe the closest thing was a Chinese dac board with 4-layers. It needed quite a bit of work to fix everything, but at least it was doable. Except for one thing, that is: AVCC_L and AVCC_R were tied together in a buried layer of the board, so not practical to separate them. That problem considerably diminishes stereo separation, which is exactly why ESS provided separate pins for each.

Sadly, Ian did the same thing (effectively tied AVCC_L and AVCC_R together) with his dual mono ES9038Q2M dac and also with the I/V output stage board. Looked like it was to reduce the number of batteries needed to run the thing (if using battery power), but an option to separate AVCC for left and right channels would have been good.