[soulblaze]

per the thread a few months ago I modded my RME digi 96/8 pad to simplify the analog path. I used black gate N 16v33uf nonpolar caps. After i modded it my airhead would give lots of noise when using it..so I hooked my headphones directly to it and sold the amp.. not really thinking too much of it.. of course now I'm buying a perreaux sxh1 so I was wondering if I should change the caps to something else in case this too will mess with the amp? any suggestions on if i used the wrong cap or not? thanks

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

Well, changing out the output caps for better ones should not have made any kind of noise problem. The caps you used should have been fine. For the best sound from that card, you should do the analog bypass mod I have detailed in other threads, but you must use a headphone amp, since the DAC chip goes straight to the ouputs in this configuration, which doesn't provide enough juice to drive headphones.

 

[soulblaze]

that's the one I did. I took out the four caps on the front and the opamp chip and used those two caps on the back to connect it to the headphone out (as per the directions here . I haven't had any problems with volume, and actually I have to run it at -18db and at volume at around 11-18% to play flac without blasting my ears off. (though when I play mp3 I have to crank it up to 100%.. difference in the decoder i guess)

if I did it correctly than I wonder why it had problems with the airhead headphone amp (the amp worked fine in all the other audio equiptment i tested it on)

 

[Edwood]

Did you do the bypass like this?

http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showt...1&page=8&pp=15

If you read towards the end of the thread, there are further components to be removed and signal traces you can cut to make the bypass more complete.

-Ed

 

[Daroid]

Edwood,
Is that the pic where all (4) stock caps were removed and higher quality (2) was put on the backside... wasn't there something about that some traces had to be cut somewhere ?

(Sorry no intention to hi-jack the thread)

 

[soulblaze]

Edwood: yup, that's what I did. I read the thread and i'm really not sure which traces I'm suposed to cut and how much of a difference that will make.