has anybody built the lite audio dac 38?

[dean.l]

I have a board and a cs8414 thats it, is this dac worth building ? it looks interesting.
or am I better off building something else?
any close up pics would also be appreciated, and any details of any mods would be good, somebody must have done a tube output stage?
also are there any screen printing mistakes on the board ? as it differs slightly from the schematic, and have read somewhere ?? that this may be wrong.

many thanks in advance.

 

[zanash]

I've got a pre built AH which I've modded and it sounds like a cross between my quad 99cdp dac and the naim cdx ...in that it has some of the best bits of both presentations. If the 38 is anywhere close it should be pretty good depending of course what your used to !

 

[dean.l]

Hi Zanash

thanks for replying, I'm used to a tda1541a non oversampling dac, in the cd50 and prefer this to an oversampling dac in say a cd52, (in my system) I have yet to try an external dac in my system, mainly because I want to build one
the dac 38 is a 24bit 96khz upsampling dac using two pcm1704's it is a nice pcb with gold contacts etc and looks easy to build, so I might have a go but I would estimate £500 on parts alone, unless I build it from standard parts, resistors etc but I see little point.
I might get the ah (is that the one with 8 tda1543's? non oversampling ?) as I like the sound I have already. (it sounds very near vinyl without the depth of sound, but close)
does it make a vast improvement on sound ? and in what way? as my system is a bit strange and would probably be a bit fussy.
has anybody tried to piggy pack tda1541a's as I have a few and heard it works well.
thanks again

 

[leo]

Can't comment how the dac 38 will sound, I do prefer the PCM1702 over the 1704 but its just down to personnel taste.
A NOS TDA1541A sounds a fair bit different to the PCM1702/4, I personally like the NOS TDA1541A best but to be honest I have not spent enough time with the PCM1702, I'm just going by a friends diy external dac and a few commercial cdp's I've heard that use them.
It would be best if you could listen to one of these dac38 units or something similar first, judging by the parts your going to need the DAC38 isn't going to be a cheap project if your starting from scratch.
The TDA1543 based dacs are cheap and easy to build and can sound quite nice too
Like everything else it just depends on your taste

I don't stack any dac chips but some people seem to like stacking TDA1543's, I don't like the signature but its easy enough to try
BTW please don't go stacking TDA1541's