SPDIF out options for Solaris owners

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k-Tracker
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Location: Mather, California
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SPDIF out options for Solaris owners

Post by k-Tracker »

Hi All,
I put that topic to restricted area on purpose. There is something I want to share with you, but not influencing on potential new owners. Keep in mind that's my personal opinion and path finding for the solution may be applicable for me only.

By the situation I had to reassemble my Solaris, (that's not the topic for the discussion "why", I needed to do that anyway for the RGB LED kit design), so I had a chance to have a look on its DACs. Have to say I spent couple of years by making my DACs around BB PCM1794 lovely chip, improving the schematics over the time. Have to say, I'm not paranoid on that :), that was for the purpose of the engineering interest rather than being strong audiophile ... Anyway, that end up with my primary DAC based on PCM1794 with jitter correction by upstreaming conversion with stable clock source. So, I have some reference sound which I can always compare.
So, back to the story.. I opened Solaris, full of excitement and expected to find something amazing in the analog circuit there. That's not happened to me, the main circuit is based around two DACs WM8590(primary stereo pair) and WM8772(3 stereo pairs) chips which are HI-FI multipurpose ADC-DAC. The primary usage model of these DACs is DVD players. You'll easily find data sheets for these and the list price. WM8590 has -110dB SNR while WM8772 only -100bB SNR.
Personally I like Wolfson products, had very positive experience with their SPDIF receivers in the past. But 4 bucks for 6 analog outputs at WM8772, that's something beyond my expectations. For the people interested to compare how it sounds, just listen Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 VX - it's there. I connected Solaris to my reference DAC, which really has "hard/strong" sounding for the monitoring purposes (has LT1359 OPAMPs), I realized, I like that sound better than any of Wolfsons but it's not ideal for the tracking.
As the result of this investigation, I made two conclusions:
1. I'm not going to use any of the outputs 3-4, 5-6, 7-8
2. use SPDIF everywhere possible in studio work on Solaris. It has limitations in routing options, simply have only one stereo pair if I don't use WM8590 main DAC.
That's bad but easy to fix for me.

There is another long story... ;) but I'll try to skip it. I used to produce Digital Out boards for Korg Karma which doesn't have the factory expansion like Triton has, but has K.A.R.M.A. It was more important for many other owners excited my Stephan Kays development. And even main DACs of KARMA made by BB PCM1716(not so bad), I decided to develop my own digital out board. Small breadboard was designed on CS8506 SPDIF transmitter and could be connected to any of two DACs in Karma. See the attachment. I did that 6 years ago and it's still relevant to me.
I have checked Wolfson DAC specs, I can adopt the schematics to Solaris with very few changes. But it needs to be soldered, so meaning violating the warranty and the risk for the board damage. The output may be in S/PDIF coaxial, AES or Toslink form factor. Not sure if somebody would be interested in that, at least there is such technical possibility. I'm not going to ask John to change schematics and replace the DACs, in current situation FW is in priority(again declaimer, that's only my opinion). But I'd love to see 8-pin header with all digital signals there. That will not require dramatic board redesign (not necessary single header, pins may be separate in close locations to DACs) but will open possibility for external options without violating the warranty.

I'm not developing any ADAT designs, even I wish to, it's serious investment. There are converters from 4* SPDIF to ADAT available from MUTEC and RME. Not cheap, but both with re-clock possibilities. Great designs.
Attachments
SPDIF option
SPDIF option
Andrei Kudryavtsev,
http://www.deftaudio.ru

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