[regal]

This is really fantastic if you like V-Out S-D DAC's. It is a discrete solution that should still give the CMRR needed for these type DAC's to sound good. One of the best open source analog stages I've seen for these type DAC's:

Ray's Audio Page


To make a cheap version of Ori's original Zhalou add it to one of the CS4398/7 boards from ebay. Just bypass the opamps to the discrete board. A better option would probably be a V-out Sabre Buffalo board or even AMB's Wolfson DAC board.

For the higher price range AudioGD makes DIY DAC's pretty much silly (JMHO). But for a budget DAC this is a great option. I would recommend powering the analog stage with a YJPS from Tangent instead of the onboard 78xx regulators. Also don't use the 100uf recommended electrolytic caps. For most any amp a good 1uF film cap will be fine (and sound much better).



To see the schematic it under " Discrete CD output stage" on the bottom left of the page.

 

[nikongod]

Thats a neat circuit! I was always curious what the Ori output stage was.

I think better performance could be realized by changing the way the filter works.

By tying C1&C2 together as well as C3&C4 and R3&R4 rather than grounding (or just replace altogether with 0.75n, 340p, and 5.74K from phase to phase, no ground connection needed here{The actual values depend which version your building, those numbers should be good for the SA8400 version}) a place where problems could come up could be eliminated. As it sits, any variation in the caps from phase to phase causes each phase's roll off to be slightly different and the error has to be corrected for by the differential pair. This keeps them EXACTLY the same and makes life easier for the differential pair.

The board space & component cost saved there could go to duplicating the output stage to get balanced outs

 

[regal]

Yea I see a lot of potential for a high quality budget DAC, I doubt I pursue it being into PMD100+R2Rs but I thought I would post this for others looking into this sort of DAC as I was at one time.