[mmerrill99]

Yep, Mantas, I'm hoping to do that shortly - I just wanted to get the rest of the system working well so I can judge if there is any sonic advantage to the change of crystal! Also, I have a a clock power supply board from Jocko over on DiyHifi but I think I'll go with 3.3V battery directly - maybe tonight (when I have finished building wardrobes for her indoors

)

 

[mmerrill99]

Ok, here's the start of the new clock install (micro-surgery is fun

):
- First pic is crystal removed with the smd Crystek clock beside it
- Second pic is the back of the smd clock with a small board cut from a matrix board - I had put solder on the clock pads as I had intended to solder to the board but I didn't use this method - instead I did this:
- Third pic - there are little grooves from the pads that go up the sides of the smd clock - here is a component lead cut-off soldered in the groove.
- I did this with all 4 pins (although I don't need pin 1 connected) & put the pins through the board from the top so I could solder the pins underneath to the copper side of the matrix off-cut board.
- Pic 4 - This gives a very solid & small structure. I soldered the out pin to the Xtalin (pin 12) where the original crystal had been.
- As a quick & dirty job I soldered the clock VDD to the 3.3V regulator Vout that goes to the Cypress USB chip; the clock gnd pin to the USB gnd at the USB socket.


Ok, I see the size limit for jpg is 97K - mine are > 100K - I'll have to see what I can do! I posted this message & the pics here: http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digit...ml#post1973535

- Plugged in USB cable but unit is now not recognised by the laptop

. Not surprising really as I haven't changed the load cap that was on the crystal (I told you this was quick & dirty to see if I could get it working straight off

). The other issue that may be causing it not to properly initialise is that there is a timing condition that an external clock has to meet for the Cypress to operate correctly. I will probably try to power the clock from a 3.3V battery as I originally intended & have this powered up before the Cypress chip.

 

[mmerrill99]

OK, here's the compressed pics for a better resolution 4th pic go to link above. Pin 1 of the smd clock (bottom right of the pic) is not connected to anything even though it looks connected!

 

[mmerrill99]

Success
The clock needs 1-2mS to initialise so it needed to be powered up before the Cypress chip as I suspected. I re-did the clock - I'll post pics later.

How's the sound, I hear you ask . Obviously all this is on my own system so whatever the abbreviation is BUT

Bass is much more solid & powerful, mids & highs are more crystalline. What I use for listening is Herbie Hancock's River (The Joni Letters) recorded in WAV to disk from CD. As I said before, I'm using a modded Lepai amp (Tripath TA2020) with no caps on the input (because I'm using a transformer). So no caps from DAC o/p straight through to amp input.

My test is to get the brush strokes on the cymbals to sound like brush strokes on cymbals with texture, etc rather than a haze of sound - this gets me closer to it with some texture showing through, not all the way. I haven't heard a system yet that renders this properly so maybe it's in the recording. As for the rest of the album, the voices sound amazingly lifelike (Tina Turner, Corrine Bailey Rae, leonard Cohen, Joni herself, etc), the piano sounds perfect, Wayne Shorter's sax playing is a wonder on this album too & you can just about hear the spit in the mouthpiece

Anyway, I would recommend this mod to anyone - cheap too ($3 clock, $8 battery). A lot of the sonic improvement may well be providing a clean PS to the clock, something I couldn't do to the crystal to test it.

I'll post the pics over there, if that's OK with the mods putting in a link to another forum?
M2TECH Hiface USB->SPDIF 24/192Khz asynch - Page 5 - diyAudio