1st try : direct from the dac to the outputs : the meters were still working before I took off IC25 opamp.
JACQUES HIFI PAGES
UPDATES : my go on the behringer ultramatch
1st
try : direct from the dac to the outputs : the meters were still working before
I took off IC25 opamp.
As a musician, I was using behringer
stuff long before any hifi aficionado. I even have in my mastering studio
a great compressor Made in Germany ...not China..So it is so natural I go inside this
clean box for a dirty mod, idea I get from , again, Mr.Lampizator. I have been
using this unit for upsampling in the digital chain for some times now and was
happy with it. Now it's time to hear it as a dac...
Please
consider on the left hand Behringer idea of ROHS & ISO9001 : some cheap black
tape on the AC live wires. Classy.
Stock, as a dac, this unit sounded
like sh..t .
A big veil was glooming its trebles like I never heard before
even in stock low-budget cd players.
Never heard any opamps output buffer
eating so much trebles.
Not a good start....until I asked Mr.Lampizator
: the deemphasis switch was on, thus cutting dramatically the trebles. My mistake.
I use asymetric XLR-cinch cable , not
that it matters a lot considering our 1 meter cables.
So before going
all the way, I just try to steal the signal on the resistor following the AKM
dac. It is worth noting that my version is newer than Mr.Lampizator and has
its circuit upside down and that this resistor in now called R47
The
stealing points are so small...Red wire is 15v for Mykonos stole from an opamp.
The direct tone seemed very good.
Well, hard to really tell as its so weak it's frightening . Something like a
tenth of what comes out of another V-out dac.
I have to redesign the mykonos for
much more gain to hear something.
Hi-gain
Mykonos hard-wired to the XLR hot point isolated from the circuit.
Job done with mykonos on steroïds
. I did not find the guts to desolder the R47...too small..
So I just took off
opamp IC25 that seems to follow the dac, which is IC24 . Seems logical but I
don't have the new schematic.
The pity about this mod, is that I lose the vu-meters
in the process...well
, I just got one led blinking.
And I can see any connection between the
meters and the analog ouputs on the old circuit diagram...weird...
But very wise guessing on the mykonos gain as the ultramatch now have the same output power than my gigawork reference dac.
Tone now : well it's a great,
great dac
now, very real thanks to its onboard AKM upsampling chip and DAC , really in
the ballpark of the gigawork which is upsampling but with cyrus upsampling chip
and dac. Hard to tell which one sounds better and they are in the same price
range.
From a diyer point of view, the behringer is quicker to 'build' but the
preamp is obligatory,
while gigawork needs a casing and transformer but its
dac is loud enough to work without preamp.
Maybe I'll try with my other ultramatch
to just steal the ouput at R47, without desoldering or removing anything,
so
maybe I can keep the vu-meter I love.
And I will compare them sonically.
MY PREAMP/BUFFER : MYKONOS AMPLIFIERS SPEAKERS CD PLAYERS DAC DRIVES / TRANSPORTS OSCILLOSCOPE TEST DRIVE TURNTABLES DCC PLAYERS