[PatOMalley]

lay the cap on table so you can read the label. Signal enters from elft out on right. Bare wire is what I do, air being the best dielectric. do not heatshrink anything, bad dielectric. Use teflon tubing if need be.

In cases like my metal covered Obbligatos I will use a small but of electric trape along area of the cap where the lead might touch. Blu Tac in that area works for me, too.


Quote:

Originally Posted by MikeW /img/forum/go_quote.gif I ordered my 4.7 uf sonicaps a few days ago, should be getting them any day now. What the best way to install them? as far as soldering them, I know you said to desolder the old caps and suck all the crap solder off, that sounds simple enough, should I use some kind of heatshrink tube to insulate the leads? or can I just use carefully routed "bare" leads, does it matter which lead go's to what side, polarity? If I don't have enough "lead" on the cap I can just solder some teflon insulated copper/silver wire to the lead and heatshrink it? got 250+ hrs now, sounds good this dac is alot mroe detailed and resolving then the older version, im sure because of power supply. I do have some sibilance and the high's are a bit to sparkly, there is alot of warmth and bass but the lowest lows are simply not there, this happend on the older version too, I guess it's a limitation of the older dac chips, maybe replacing these output caps will help get some more bottom end. Thanks Mike

 

[MikeW]

Got the new caps installed, went pretty good, I put some high quality thermal compound on the dac chips while I had it open too. I got some pic's, soldering is sloppy I know, but it sounds good so far, need to let caps burn in now, the hard part. I had to run wires, there was no way the cap leads would be long enough, so I cut them short and used some teflon insulated cardas "chasis" wire, 23.5 awg, probably not the best wire, but it dident cost 6$ a foot either lol. Total cost for this upgrade with caps, shipping, and wire was 34$ Im currently un-employed, once I get a job I plan to put the lundhal transformer on there as well. What size fuse does this use? slow or fast? Can't wait till these caps burn in!

 

[PatOMalley]

Just pop the fuse out. It will give it's spec on the metal contact.

 

[rhodes54]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PatOMalley /img/forum/go_quote.gif Just pop the fuse out. It will give it's spec on the metal contact.

As far as I can see on your pictures they still use too small fuses for the holder. This can cause dangerous situations as the fuse is way too loose it the holder.

So either get rid of the fuse (and holder) or exchange the fuse for one with the correct size.

 

[MikeW]

the picture may be misleading, the fuse is actually very tight.

edit: did some serious listening today at 40 hrs on the sonicaps, sweeping improvments across the board really, everything's improved, more detail, bigger soundstage, tighter, more impactful bass, warmer, with less edge and sparkle, sibilance is way improved. At only 40 hrs, not sure how long these sonicaps take to burn in. My main complaint of the old caps was the harsh sparkle and edge at the high end.

As a guide for others who may wish to swap out the stock caps on the Luxery version, I really don't see you getting anything to much larger then this into the chasis and getting all buttoned up nicely. perhaps slightly larger. The dimensions on this cap are 0.74 x 1.80 or 19x46mm. So if your shooting to replace the caps in the same chasis, I recomend staying at/around that size. If you want high quality 1uf or greater caps to fit, shoot for low voltage versions, like 200v, most of the size of the higher quality caps seems to be related to the huge voltage specs (600+)

 

[MikeW]

wonder how those fuses at cryoparts.com stack up, 10 bucks for a cryo'ed ceramic fuse.

 

[PatOMalley]

what is the url for cryoparts.com?

 

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[MikeW]

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New caps hit 120 Hrs now, I was not able to listen at all yesterday and dac went good 24 hr burn in without me listening at all. Big changes again at this 120 hrs, more bass and more clairity, quite noticebly better then it was at 40 hrs. What an amazing upgrade, so simple too, I feel like a fool for not doing it sooner, replacing the coupling caps should be a required mod for anyone who owns this dac, it's a serious upgrade. With stock caps this dac really has "no lows" and "no highs" in comparison.

I recently have been doing some critical listening between USB/Coax/Optical. Coming from the same Oppo as source I could not identify any differnce at all between optical/coax, and that's with a blue jeans Coax vs sony plastical optical. The coax cable is alot better then the optical, butI honestly could hear no differnce, I think this must have to do with the Reclocking. And to add more confusion, there was very little differnce with the USB interface for that matter. I don't think I could a/b between the 3. I still want to try a nice SPDIF converter, maybe that M2Tech Hiface.

 

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[Habaneroholic]

Just received my valab dac today. 'luxury version'

Of course right after that I see they are now selling an upgraded version with external supply.

This is one of the secondary systems in the house.

Sonos--->Valab---->Vaughn Carina---->Decware NFX speakers.

Old pic, I'll update it to show the DAC.

I'm using the rca digital in, and getting intermittent blasts of static. I've tried several different digital cables with no difference. I'm heading out later to grab a toslink cable(only have glass optical here) and see if it makes any difference.

A large part of the decision to purchase this DAC was reading the impressions, and adventures of modifying this product into a little giant killer.

Main system is reclocked Wadia 20-->Genesis Digital Lens--->Audio Note 3.1x Signiture. Once I get a chance to swap a few parts, and break this in, we'll see if it can dish out a smackdown.

John C.

 

[MikeW]

Somtimes the static is deffective dac, more often it is a burn in issue. The dac sounds pretty terrible out of the box, and improves dramatically over time, first at about 40 hrs, then at 85, and yet again in the 150's. Obviously I recomend upgrading the output coupling cap's as the first mod. (unfortunatly, as soon as you change them, you have to go thru the long burn in process all over again)

That power supply has actually been availible for quite awhile now, it's only slightly better then what's in the luxery version. They use the same R-core transformer, but the separate power supply has a few upgraded components. There's a big differnce between the Standard and Luxery though. The main benefit would be having more room in the chasis to fit larger capacitors, that was my main challenge in modding this dac, finding a high quality capacitor in a 4.7uf size that would fit inside the chasis, there's not alot out there, sonicraft and auricap, im sure there's a few others. Although, keeping 4.7uf is not a requirement, it was one of my goals.

Edit: Those are some sweet looking speakers! I love the wild things art too!

 

[Habaneroholic]

OK, toslink made zero difference.

A few hours, and the noise has dissapeared BEETLEJIUCE BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE! No, its gone.

I felt bold enough that I found 2 .01uf V-caps in my parts bin, and wirewrapped them to the leads of the 10uf caps, and soldered them in bypass. I left the cap leads full length for now since I will probably replace the tant caps with a smaller value and need the full length to reach across a big paper/oil cap. My past experience is that tantalum caps aren't very musical anyway.

John C.

 

[MikeW]

hmmm v-caps, hi dolla rolla u are. In other news, I stumbled upon the "How to Equalize your headphones" thread and I've been playing around with a high quality parametric equalizer and sine/tone generator to find the peaks in my headphone and eliminate them. Before I was a pretty big fan of no eq and just straight bit perfect audio, but after following the suggestions in that guide im not so sure now, the EQ was transparent with no easily identifiable loss of quality, and it got rid of the treble sibilance that has always bothered me with my Denon 2000's. (a large spike around 7500 hrz) Parametric EQ is an eye opener for me, I've played with graphic eq's before but they are not nearly as high quality as parametric.

 

[qusp]

well i've just committed to buy one of these babies from a member here, I already have a Buffalo32 thats i'm just casing up, so its not likely to be a primary dac, but I got it for a bit of fun, perhaps i'll be surprised. I will probably end up using it as a secondary rig with another small set of active monitors down in the workshop.

I have plenty of stuff in my parts bin that some of you (but not all) will maybe see as overkill. The idea is to have some fun with some parts that have been accumulating over the last 12 months, as well as using this as a sort of test bed for mods that may apply elsewhere, perhaps even flow through to my work as well. the fact this is such a simple design should (and apparently does) mean it will show changes fairly plainly when made. plan is to drive this from a spare LLP power supply from a second Lisa III I have here to supply nice clean DC power to the DAC and ideally eventually Battery power. I also have

some TX2575 resistors 0.005% 360 ohm for I/V
Vampire BNC panel mount
Eichmann and Bocchino panel mounted female RCA
Furutech rhodium over silver IEC
HiFi tuning silver star fuse (1A will this do??)
Tocos silver DPDT switch
Grennan OFC and teflon terminal strips
Duelund Copper VSF 3.9uf
Mundorf Silver in oil .68uf
Blackgate NXHQ 2200uf
Blackgate NXHQ 220, 47, 22, 0.47, 0.1uf
VCAP OIMP 3.3uf
Cryoparts SCSCAg
Cryoparts TWcu
cotton and silk tubing
foamed teflon tubing
Duelund 2.0 silver foil in silk/oil
Duelund 1.0 silver foil in silk/oil
DIR9001 (its an early 2009 model, so not certain what will be inside)
ERS paper
Blutack

SCSCAg BNC cable (as part of a digital breakout cable from my RME 9632) also has AES, but thats no good here. I will be using my Mac G5->RME and the above breakout as transport initially, but think I will likely end up using an airport downstairs
SCSCAg USB cable
12AWG Neotech UPOCC solid core power cable with OYAIDE P037 (for LLP, but I might try direct for an base level test initially

right thats what I have laying around, obviously i'm not going to put all that in at once (particularly the caps) but thats what i have to work with. the Duelund caps are worth twice as much as the DAC

but i'm very keen to hear what they sound like in such a simple circuit, as they do wonders in ipod docks and this should be more revealing.

looking at the lundahl pulse tranformer mod for the BNC input as well as maybe (a big maybe) a nice Lundahl output transformer for output coupling, but where's the fun in that, all other mods would be meaningless in a way if I do that.
depending on how the LLP goes as PSU, I might think about building a Jung super regulator, or simply go fully regulated SLA battery powered like i'm planning to do with all the line level gear in my rig/s

anything else I should look at grabbing that you guys can see?? have any of you guys bypassed the reclocking unit?? thats one thing i'm assuming this model does have and i'm not sure i'm keen on it being there. I want to have the polar opposite to the Buffalo32; in that I would like there to be not only no oversampling or upsampling, but also no reclocking. or have you guys found that to be a good thing, rather than the jitter being embedded further into the signal and surfacing elsewhere??