My source setup is pretty modest: a refurbished IBM T23 laptop running MS XP Pro into a M-Audio Audiophile USB I snagged off of eBay for very little. I ripped almost three hundred CDs into FLAC (a Free Lossless Audio Codec) using Exact Audio Copy and an old Iomega CD-RW drive I had lying around. A good setup primer for EAC is here.
For playback, I'm using Foobar 0.9.x using the native ASIO support -- the M-Audio unit comes with a ASIO driver and the Foobar ASIO component works as it should, so all's well. As you can see from the image, 'minimalism' aptly describes my Foobar setup; I have the foo_ui_columns, foo_uie_albumlist, foo_uie_albumart, and foo_uie_trackinfo components and some customization going on, but again quite 'minimal'.
The M-Audio Audiophile USB isn't much, but it does okay and I expect that I'll be building something better soon.
[18 Apr 08] I finally have a top-shelf DAC. This project has been in the works for some time, since Sept. '05. Pedja had just a couple DAC boards left and I snagged one. It's a CS8412 S/PDIF receiver into a TDA1541A DAC; I/V conversion is done using the AD844 chip as a common base stage (Pedja describes it here, about half way down). Over the following year or so I collected all the parts, but I never started: zero confidence that I could get it going.
Spring turned to summer, summer to fall, and so on and so forth... I got interested in using my laptop as an audio player and I picked up the M-Audio jobbie for the interim. I finished a bunch of other projects, and properly emboldened by my success I got back to the DAC last year. I ordered a PCM2707-based USB to I2S board from Doede, a board for the 12Vdc supply, picked up the rest of the parts I needed including a custom transformer from Boris at Vista Audio, and bam! over the Chistmas holidays put everything together. The build went very smoothly, all the PS voltages were right on, and the DAC fired right up withough smoke or flames. Further, it sounded wonderful right from the start. You can see Phase-One in my build here, properly screwed to a couple pieces of wood as it's my prefered choice of 'chassis'. I didn't populate either the S/PDIF receiver portion of Pedja's board or the TDA1543 section of Doede's, for simplicity.
The next step was to add some form of reclocking. I thought about doing a ASRC (Pedja even had a board for that at one time), but I opted to go a different way. Maybe better, maybe worse, I don't have the background to say either way -- it's just different. I picked up a Tentlabs XO-DAC, which Kevin at K&K Audio was selling for cheap. Then I 'borrowed' carlosfm's work at DIYHiFi.org to put together a PLL-based reclocking circuit. Here is a schematic and there is my version of the PCB layout, done using ExpressPCB. I honestly wish that I had thought to give carlosfm credit on the board, but it completely slipped my mind -- I really should have. I also have a block diagram to show how the three boards are hooked up. The sound of the DAC with the reclocking is certainly improved. I like it very much and hopefully this summer I'll get around to putting it all into something befitting its permanency in my system.
