JACQUES HIFI PAGES
UPDATES : tda1541 non-oversampling with mykonos in a 3A cdp
The french 3A brand was more famous
in France for their speakers from the end of the 70's to the 80's. To my memory they
were the first 2.1 system I never saw , with a nice living room table in the
role of the subwoofer. It's the 1st time I see a cdp from them, while it was
screaming Philips at first glance.
Besides, I really love the remote.
Philips it is , with no doubt.
But there are 2 interesting thing with this player.
The 1st one is that
it has a really beautiful transformer, all incapsulated in metal like on Fender
amp. Can't be bad.
The second is that it's already moded non-oversampling.
You can see there is no saa7220---so no possible spdif stealing--, and that
the saa7210 is the only link between the CD and the DAC. I have always thought
that the non-oversampling mod was a good idea, but I hate desolder big chips..I
am not skilled at that with my big soldering iron. So here, no sweat, I can
try this mod easily.
I took the signal from the 1st opamp that does I/V
conversion---I could not separate the outputs from the board...it did not worked
that way--- and take the 12v for mykonos from the 2nd opamp from under the board.
I immediately noticed a 220v hum in the speaker so I supposed that the light
blue cap was too light for good filtering of the 12v--see red circle in the
2 pictures.
The big nichicon cap was perfect, and no more hum was to be heard anymore. And sound was astonishing, even with this humble version of mykonos---non-motorola transistors and no-name caps.
This time I could compare two
extremes cd sound : here the good old 1541 non-A in direct mode and the gigawork
upsampling 24bit. They both are excellent but the differences are so obvious
that I really choose one of them depending on the record. The nos 1541 is better
with classical music or 70's music, being meatier and the gigawork goes with
newer recording because of its extreme clarity and perfect stereo imaging.
Very
cool to have the ability to choose and kudos again for the old tda1541, still
champion to this day.
MY PREAMP/BUFFER : MYKONOS AMPLIFIERS SPEAKERS CD PLAYERS DAC DRIVES / TRANSPORTS OSCILLOSCOPE TEST DRIVE TURNTABLES DCC PLAYERS