NOS DACs, really that good?

I agree,there is alot of hype surrounding this player,while amazing what it can do for its peanut price is amazing,but critical listening to the CD playing side of things,while alot of fun,poppy,in yer face sound,ultimately it's what you've described.

 

I'm surprised how similar the parts used in a lot of the commercial DACs. Fixed regs, large filter caps, Panasonic FC caps, standard oscons and Black Gates.

The dac is so simple that changing parts can change the sound entirely, and I don't think these parts do the DAC justice. The CS8412/TDA1543 doesn't really have "a sound."

The best results I've had so far are LM317T regs, carbon I/V resistor, Sanyo SEP decoupling caps, no preregulation (at least not with off the shelf regs), lots of passive filtering before the regs, small filter caps (start with one 330u, and then add more according to taste). About £60 for the whole shebang.

 

Hi,

NOS DAC stands for "Non Oversampling Digital to Analogue Converter. It is actually a generic term and you can get such DAC's from a wide range of sources.

The classic TDA1543 NonOS DAC's are surprisingly good for what's inside. I started with these after getting Kusonoki's stuff from MJ. But they are rather limited by the use of the TDA1543 and also by the fact that most DAC's using them do not employ a corrected for the Sin(x)/(x) (also called Sinc) rolloff which attenuates the higher frequencies above around 10KHz notably.

You can get quite expensive NonOS DAC's from Audio Note and Zanden.

I found the TDA1541 a much better choice (Zanden uses this), the PCM56 and 63 (also 1702/1704) are very good choices, the TDA1545 is also pretty good. Audio Note uses the AD1865 and it is pretty much downwards from there. The biggest advantage of the TDA1543/1545 group is the ease with which one can implement a Battery Supply.

Ciao T