You did ask for ideas! The budget market is very much me-too. Surely you've built up a following on the forums with the taste for a little more performance? Maybe it's just me.
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You did ask for ideas! The budget market is very much me-too. Surely you've built up a following on the forums with the taste for a little more performance? Maybe it's just me.
I can only speak for myself, but what I call budget can be a difficult feat to repeat by even the Chinese DAC builders :eyebrows:. As I was playing with the prototype of the Caiman RC I put it aside and asked myself why I spent two years improving on the Caiman, instead of improving on the technology? I happen to read a review of a recent DAC that mentioned it introduced the technology of upsampling to 384KHz. It struck me that the TC-7510 was oversampling at 352.8KHz and 384KHz all those years ago, but little was ever made of it by me as far as marketing was concerned. There was only a brief mention in the product write up.
I suspect that my next budget DAC will be an equally impressive giant killer, and give me a bit more time to come up with something more spectacular for the well healed.
stan has done an excellent job regading the mod,work with what you have,upgrad to the best parts you can afford and improving the power supply is the heart of any audio gear.sad to say cost constrants to build in a certan price range limits some part quality.
Just a note, I have both balanced systems (have worked with them for years) and non-balanced. After lots of experimenting, I do not believe that balanced is any panacea or that it has any inherent sound quality advantage. What it can do is to provide common mode noise rejection, and if implemented properly it can provide immunity to ground/earth current fluctuations (which unbalanced can overcome with good grounding practice). This may be useful for you in a specific case (I've seen this once domestically with high RFI problems), and it is useful for professional applications where cable runs of many 10s of meters are common. Balanced is of course mostly required for professional microphones as they have noise problems from long cable runs - that's a whole other story.
However, this comes at a cost of typically double the component count (which means double the distortion and noise generating bits), and added complexity. Balanced does give you an extra 6dB of gain (that's quite a bit), which can give the illusion of sounding better. Depending on how it is implemented (ICs etc), a balanced audio circuit can sound worse than its unbalanced counterpart due to poor implementation and added component count. I have experienced this with some balanced input power amps, which were essentially unbalanced but ran the balanced input through extra op-amps and sounded worse through the balanced input.
Stan is right, for typical home listening, unbalanced is fine and provides a more cost effective solution. With properly controlled listening tests, and well designed equipment, I've never heard a significant difference. Don't forget that such audio design gurus as Nelson Pass (and Scott Wurcer etc) have produced many unbalanced designs when they could have produces balanced versions if they thought it sounded better (yeah, OK, NP used balanced too with the later Zen-like designs, but for the extra gain...).
I wasn't arguing for pseudo-balanced designs. I only use components with fully balanced internal design, where balanced connections are the natural continuity between components. There is no additional component count in this case, it's the natural way of connecting them up together.Quote:
Originally Posted by tdog
Been there, done that :)Quote:
Originally Posted by nickbojko
There's not really a lot more I can do to my Caiman. And lest anyone thinks I'm criticising Stan, nothing could be further from the truth. I applaud his great designs, his openness and willingness to be present on a forum to answer so many questions from the likes of us. He is a model to other manufacturers as to how to generate a large and loyal following.
I just use my Caiman (and Gator board) as Stan sent them to me.
I can't be doing will all this fussing.
Any significant improvements would come in the speaker area, and that can get expensive.
Note that I am very happy with my Caiman now that I have an updated Gator board from Stan and I don't think I have any need for XLRs.
That said I do remember reading that my Rotel Class-D amp, which uses standard ICE Class-D modules, is actually a balanced design but there is a simple phono to balanced board on the inputs and people have converted these back to a balanced input. Let me go google...
Ah, here is a discussion: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...1109794&page=3 with a pointer to the original work on a French language forum: http://www.homecinema-fr.com/forum/v...056&t=29914113
I have had my caiman a few weeks now and im enjoying it very much but would like to try this passive mod.
When i had the 7520 i also had the gator board fitted which again was very good.I don't have the money to get the gator board for the caiman atm so for now can someone reccomend some caps to try.
My croft amp has an input impedance of 100 kΩ
With an amp input impedance of 100K you have a lot of options. Firstly I would recommend that you browse back through this thread and find the diagram that shows how to insert the caps into the opamp board sockets. Basically you remove the opamp board and insert the cap legs into the left hand socket. Doing the mod this way makes it easily reversible.
Next I would recommend that you familiarise your self with the cap value calculators HERE. Looking at the calculator on the right, you need to enter your input impedance in ohms (100000) and then decide how low you want your bass to go. I'd recommend that the highest value you enter in the Hz box is 10Hz. You can go all the way down below 1Hz if you like but there's not much point. There's more info on all that earlier in the thread. So if you put in 100000 ohms and 10Hz you get a cap value of 0.16uF. That means you need to look for caps that are 0.16 or higher. However there's not much point going above 22uF as that will give you a bass roll-off frequency of 0.72Hz. Don't worry if you can't find the exact value of cap recommended by the calculator. A close value will be fine.
Now that you know the cap value you need to decide the cap type. You mainly want to concentrate on non-polar caps, sometimes called bi-polar. Electrolytic caps are the worst type for this application but they're the smallest and cheapest and some do sound pretty darn good. There aren't many non-polar electrolytic's. Seen as you are able to use low value caps I'd recommend you look at film caps like polypropylene, polyester, teflon etc. They all sound a bit different. The only downsides are that they're bigger and more expensive. Teflon's are some of the most expensive but arguably the best. Some people like oil impregnated caps. These can be good but pricey. You would not believe how expensive some teflon and oil caps get. I'm talking £1000+ for some crazy ones. :eek:
On the subject of voltage ratings; anything from about 6V upwards is fine. Some film caps have ratings over 1000V which is also fine. Just remember that the bigger the cap, the bigger the cap leads. Leads above about 0.8-1mm probably won't fit in the sockets.
The choice of caps is mainly down to the price you want to pay and whether you want to be able to replace the cover or not.
THESE are some of the best electrolytic caps and are a great entry point to see if you like the passive sound. THESE film caps are highly regarded and are good value.
ClarityCap's are also good value, as are the Mundorf Supreme. Elna electrolytic's don't seem to work well in this application, so avoid them.
Another tip is to avoid branded caps from foreign countries on eBay. There are lots of fakes around.
Happy cap rolling. :cool: