Originally Posted by
jkeny
BTW, I'm well into modding this unit now. Here's what I've done so far:
- removed 3.3V switching reg & replaced with external supply
- removed 5V reg & replaced with external supply
- tapped I2S to a socket that I can plug my I2S ESS DAC into (ES9022 at the moment - ES9018 eventually)
- although I wasn't particularly interested in the WM8051 on-board DAC I decided to experiment with it as it will drive headphone loads without problem.
- Removed output coupling caps & wired directly - sounds good through external caps
- played around with VMID & tried a transformer output between VMID & Vout (cancelling the 2.5V bias) - sounded distorted
- supplied external 2.5V on one leg of trafo primary instead of VMID - sounds wonderful
So with your suggestion I'll now try to disable VMID & supply it with external 2.5V
Things left to do:
- remove 1.2V switching reg & supply from external
- remove wifi board (I'm only interested in wired connection) - this can be done with the 1.2V & 3.3V external supply in place & unit doesn't report a hardware error
- remove 11.289MHz clock & provide external clock to Xilinx pin 42
- disable SPDIF on 74HC chip
- further de-couple all sensitive chips.
- would love to provide a clean 3.3V directly to Xilinx chip as I think it would benefit from a clean supply but the PS is provided through a power plane & no traces showing that can be cut. This has to share the 3.3V PS with Realtek & 74HC & WM8501. I could remove the 74HC & WM off the 3.3V bus but not the Realtek.
Anyway, the device has good potential & I've order a low jitter clock to complete my mods. Sound from the WM DAC via transformers is very good.