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y1 gamma-1 DAC - Page 30

post #436 of 1537
2/8/09 at 3:47am
That's great to hear! It's an impressive feat for me too. The smallest one was very similar to the PCM2702 I attempted to solder, but I finished it in less than thirty seconds!

Anyways, to go further into my problem, my desk lamp is causing the DAC to have problems.

Desktop -> USB -> y1 -> Lyrix (USB bus powered); no problems so far.

But, since I wanted my Lyrix to be powered by wallwart, I did just that. If I turn off my lamp it seems to cause problems with the Lyrix, and I think the y1 received a disturbance from that:

Desklamp power cut -> Surge strip -> wallwart -> Lyrix -> interconnect -> y1

I guess the wallwart for my Lyrix is unregulated? Or I'm thinking my surge strip/dorm AC is not very good... it's an 80 year old building after all. What options are there for me? A UPS or power conditioner?
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post #437 of 1537
2/8/09 at 4:34am
Quote:
Originally Posted by ShinyFalcon View Post
I guess the wallwart for my Lyrix is unregulated? Or I'm thinking my surge strip/dorm AC is not very good... it's an 80 year old building after all. What options are there for me? A UPS or power conditioner?

You may just have power that's bad enough to cause the regs to drop out.

You might meter the mains but it's DANGEROUS! I have really poor power at work - 113V sometimes. Causes all sorts of issues.
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post #438 of 1537
2/9/09 at 8:43pm
Finished Half the y1 tonight. (Been over the soldering iron doing various things for 6 and a half hours!) So i decided i would get the USB board working. It works! Im rather amused with myself now...
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post #439 of 1537
2/9/09 at 8:53pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by rhys h View Post
So i decided i would get the USB board working. It works! Im rather amused with myself now...
I did that too with the USB board. Got half way through doing both together, then got impatient

*

On another note, my second y1 is entertaining a lot less action on the for sale forums than I thought it would. I'm selling it at what I thought was a bloody good price too. I suspect that there is still a lot of ignorance in the community as to how awesome these little babies are
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post #440 of 1537
2/9/09 at 8:56pm
I have lost the screws for one of the panels now. Does anyone have the screws that came with the hammond, if they used a 3rd party screw?

R
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post #441 of 1537
2/9/09 at 9:16pm
I have a couple hundred extra Hammond screws but you live way across the ocean....
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post #442 of 1537
2/9/09 at 10:36pm
Has anyone commented on how good this sounds sans amp? Drives my YH-3 orthos well...Could be my new all in one work solution! Well, if it had a tube...
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post #443 of 1537
2/10/09 at 2:38am
MisterX, PM you earlier on.
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post #444 of 1537
2/10/09 at 5:36am
Quote:
Originally Posted by wiatrob View Post
Has anyone commented on how good this sounds sans amp? Drives my YH-3 orthos well...Could be my new all in one work solution! Well, if it had a tube...
The YH-3 has an impedance of 150 ohms. While the WM8501 DAC chip has no trouble with this kind of load, the default γ1 output coupling capacitors' value (23uF) will form a high-pass filter with this load having an fc of 46Hz. With the right program material (and assuming that the headphones actually have usable response below 50Hz) you'll probably hear some loss of super-low-end bass.

γ1 wasn't designed to be a headphone amp. Even though it could drive low impedance loads better than most other DACs out there (notwithstanding the high-pass filter issue), it would still sound better when used with a proper headphone amp. If you use γ1 with a computer via its USB input and Windows, run with ASIO4ALL and a player program that supports it (i.e., foobar2000), so that it bypasses the Windows Kmixer for bit-perfect data stream. Use your headphone amp's volume control instead of any software volume control for best results.

If you must use the γ1 to drive headphones directly, I recommend 300 ohms or higher headphones. But such headphones tend to need more voltage swing than the γ1 could deliver, so an amp with gain would still be desirable.
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post #445 of 1537
2/10/09 at 2:25pm
Finished this little thing just now, plugged it straight in, all i can say is a bloody well done to AMB and MisterX!!!!!
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post #446 of 1537
2/10/09 at 3:54pm
After having a listen, the y1 seems to be quite bass light compared to my other dac, i was wondering if there is anything i can do to improve this?
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post #447 of 1537
2/10/09 at 5:57pm
rhys, what amp are you driving your phones with, particularly, what is the input impedance on that amp? What value coupling capacitors did you use on the y1?

Also, are there any caps in the signal path of your amplifier?

If it's not a high pass filter lowering the gain in the bass frequencies, then my bet is your other dac is either bass heavy or treble light. The y1's frequency response is pretty flat, as you can see on the y1's website (0.8Hz - 48.0KHz, +0.2dB, -3.0dB, 96KHz sampling frequency). See the specs section on AMB's site for a graph of the frequency response at various sampling frequencies.
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post #448 of 1537
2/10/09 at 5:58pm
Fixed it, winamp equaliser had set itself to treble boost.
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post #449 of 1537
2/10/09 at 6:07pm
use asio plug in for winamp.
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post #450 of 1537
2/10/09 at 10:03pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by rhys h View Post
Fixed it, winamp equaliser had set itself to treble boost.
Well, there's that too...
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