Soekris "dac1541": DAC/Amp - Stream of Consciousness Impressions

Discussion in 'Headphone Amplifiers and Combo (DAC/Amp) Units' started by Torq, Jul 27, 2017.

  1. TheIceman93

    TheIceman93 El pato-zorro

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    Haven’t posted in a while, school is brutal. Anyways, thought I ask about a little gremlin in my system.

    I’ve isolated the issues to the 1541 after some testing. So approximately 1 out of 10 times I listen to my system, I get a glitch where the music intermittently cuts in and out, usually for a second or two. Shutting off the DAC makes it go away but then it comes back a few listening sessions later.

    I am running my CD player via coax into the 1541 which then feeds a Lake People RS08. I’ve ruled out the amp being the problem because the drop outs happen with the 1541’s internal amp as well. I have yet to experience the problem using USB from my computer but I hardly ever use that as a source. I don’t think it’s the CD player because I swapped out the 1541 for the Modi Multi for a week and I never had the problem. It’s not a disk problem because my CDs play just fine in my car.

    Any thoughts? Maybe I just need to upgrade to the new firmware? The only other symptom is that the 44khz LED sometimes flashes when the drop outs happen, but not always. Very strange.
     
  2. Jinxy245

    Jinxy245 Vegan Puss

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    Hopefully @soekris can chime in here, if not someone with ideas...
     
  3. Syzygy

    Syzygy Friend

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    Rule out / check the coax cable.
     
  4. porkfriedpork

    porkfriedpork Friend

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    Coax doesnt work with my dac1541.
    I sent it in for repair and Soren said
    it worked fine on his system. Same
    cable works on my other dacs. I
    think coax on soekris is just hit or miss.
     
  5. Vtory

    Vtory Audiophile™

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    @TheIceman93

    It seems that your dac failed to lock the input digital signal. Can be attributed to many reasons -- most typically coax cable affected by surrounding emis.

    1. As a possible remedy or self-test to find the real problem, I'd suggest you to try toslink optical (or aes xlr if applicable). If glitches are gone, then either surrounding emi or spdif chip is problem.

    2. Also you can (temporarily) re-position your cdp so that coax cable isn't affected by other cables or signals.

    If neither works, then something might happen to the internal clock -- contact soekris to get your unit examined.
     
  6. cskippy

    cskippy Creamy warmpoo

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    I use optical without issue in both my bedroom and desktop locations. Haven’t tried coax but if optical is an option give it a whirl.
     
  7. TheIceman93

    TheIceman93 El pato-zorro

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    I hope my DAC doesn’t have coax problem. Sounds like a potential hardware issue. I was hoping to avoid using optical out of my CD player. I thought the coax sounded slightly better when I tested both connections.
     
  8. bilboda

    bilboda Florida boomer

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    When I had the 1341, Soren confirmed that the coax was sensitive. I was able to raise up the voltage on my pi/502dac that was feeding it and that solved the problem.. What is at he other end? Which headphone? Maybe a very short spdif cable will improve things. You might try a rca to bnc adapter and try the bnc input.
     
  9. TheIceman93

    TheIceman93 El pato-zorro

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    I’m going to try an RCA to BNC cable next. Both the RCA and BNC input are coax so I would assume they both would have the exact same problem? Is there any reason why the BNC would be a more reliable connection? Hoping @soekris can chime in here.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2019
  10. porkfriedpork

    porkfriedpork Friend

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    BNC adapter made no difference for me.
    Save your 3$
     
  11. TheIceman93

    TheIceman93 El pato-zorro

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    I wouldn’t think that it would but now I’m starting to wonder if the cable is partly the problem. The coax cable I’m using is pretty thin. Maybe a coax cable with better shielding will help? It’s a short cable but it’s rubbing up against a rats nest of power and signal cables from my rig and PC.
     
  12. soekris

    soekris MOT - Soekris Engineering

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    There is an issue with some of the early dac1541s, the sensitivity on the Coax/RCA SPDIF is a little low. AES is fine, so is Toslink and of course USB.
    Upgrading to firmware 1.20 will improve a little, but I can also offer a hardware upgrade. Anybody who have an early dac1541 who wished to have it upgraded, send an email to [email protected] for instructions.
     
  13. TheIceman93

    TheIceman93 El pato-zorro

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    Tempting. Are you comfortable stating in the thread how much the upgrade would cost? US members will also need to consider the price of shipping which won’t be cheap. Does the BNC coax input have the same low sensitivity?
     
  14. jexby

    jexby Posole Prince

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    Exit stage left....
    coax nervosa is now a thing. ;)
     
  15. JoshMorr

    JoshMorr Friend

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    Soekris takes care of their customers, top notch customer service. Trust in Soren
     
  16. Newk Yuler

    Newk Yuler New

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    Pop the hood on the CD player and look for an isolation transformer on the S/PDIF. Soren has isolation transformers on the S/PDIF inputs of his DACs and having two in line is unnecessary. I'd appreciate Soren's perspective on the reasoning (beside the obvious) when some prospective customers wouldn't need or want another isolation transformer on the DAC input. Many source products already have galvanic isolation on the coax S/PDIF connections and some may produce integrity issues which made me wonder about the problem Soren had early-on with the coax S/PDIF. I've had a Soekris DAC on a short list for a little while and one of the things keeping me from making a decision is knowing my primary source already has high quality isolation on its coax S/PDIF output.

    What is Soren's hardware upgrade?
     
  17. TheIceman93

    TheIceman93 El pato-zorro

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    Maybe I just need to get over my optical nervosa. I got it stuck in my head that coax was better and that might have colored my listening impressions. A decent glass Toslink will probably be cheaper than Soren’s upgrade and shipping the unit to Denmark.
     
  18. soekris

    soekris MOT - Soekris Engineering

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    Upgrade itself is free, but you have to pay for shipping to Denmark, I pay for shipping back.
    BNC and RCA have same sensitivity.
     
  19. soekris

    soekris MOT - Soekris Engineering

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    Two isolation transformers don't hurt by itself, but I simply need to have one as there are plenty of SPDIF sources without one....

    Source of the sensitivity issues is that I originally used a RS422 receiver that wasn't perfect for the job, and unfortunately the SPDIF source I used for testing had high output.... Fix is both firmware and changing the termination resistor to a higher value. That in principle is not perfect, but works just fine at the relatively low speed SPDIF signals and the more tolerant receiver by the firmware modification.... Current revision boards use a different RS422 receiver chip.
     
  20. earnmyturns

    earnmyturns Smartest friend

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    I’ve used my 1541 with coax from Pi2Designs 502 for quite a while, although now I’m using XLR instead. Zero issues in both cases.
     

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