USB DAC for £40

[Rare Bird]

Well the Musiland 01 USD arrived, I installed firmware 1.0.6.0 and enabled ASIO drivers in Foobar

Currently listening to some 24/96 material feeding a B Caiman and Sabre dac which is working fine
I feel the power supply from USB definitely needs disconnecting and then run it from an external supply, I'll do some mods later but for now I'll let it run in

Anyone listern to this musiland with 96kHz encoded FLAC's? Seems this seller aint got none left

[leo]

Flac and WAV play fine through the Musiland as long as playback software can play it

[Rare Bird]

Flac and WAV play fine through the Musiland as long as playback software can play it

No auto software loading then leo??

[leo]

I just use Foobar with ASIO drivers

BTW I nearly always find Flac to sound different to WAV IF using a soundcard or a USB dac/converter , only time I've found flac and WAV to sound about the same is if using a device like the Squeezebox.
To me Flac sounds smoother less dynamic than WAV, edges are softer, this maybe down to the PC or the software, I dunno yet, I'm still new with PC audio so need to look into it

Anyway the Musiland offers 1 x optical and 2 x co-axial output (1 x BNC the other RCA).
I decided to play about with the RCA co-axial out circuit, its been mentioned the pulse transformers inside these Musilands are not that great so I decided to remove one from one in the RCA output, I adjusted the attenuation and also changed the RCA socket to a 75R BNC

Comparing the now modded co-axial output against the stock co-axial output gave quite a difference, the adjusted one sounded less compressed and the bass goes noticeably lower, these differences are clearly heard using all my dacs including the Caiman

Next thing I want to try is disconnect the USB DC source and run an external PSU, USB tends to be noisy so I'm interested to see if cleaning that up improves performance

I'll also look into better pulse traffo's later to replace the dodgy looking one which is left for the other co-axial output

[Rare Bird]

Keep us updated Leo, i don't believe in spending mega bucks on DAC, mostly uncalled for.., like to investigate these cheap ones.