Comes as a bare PCB, a kit, or you can buy it assembled. Peter Daniel, of Audio Sector, is a pleasure to work with, a font of knowledge, and incredibly helpful.Pictured DAC is one of Peter's stock photos.
Since the DAC is non oversampling, the quantized source material isn't "mangled" in any way, except for the brick wall filter (composed of an RC net) right after the TDA1543. I've never heard (or maybe I never cared enough to notice) a NOS DAC, but the principal sounded appealing. Aliases at the upper end of the audio spectrum, assumed to be just beyond the range of hearing, in theory means oversampling and somewhat harsh digital filters can simply go away. I thought it'd be a nice experiment to see exactly how much I'd notice.
So far, the DAC only has a handful of hours on it, well below the sweet spot for the BlackGate caps to break in. My experience with it thus far have me a bit confused. Low end opened up quite a bit as compared to my Airport Express's (more on that later) lackluster onboard DAC. However, the upper end sounds a bit...squelshed. It's as if at the very end of the spectrum, cymbals and guitar plucks are being recorded off of a nearby wall, but I'm hoping this is all psychosomatic or just a function of the filter breaking in. Will update after longer listening sessions
Currently working on a TOSlink MUXer to feed the dac. Will post designs when I can find more cycles to finish the PCB. In theory, it can probably be made using point to point connections, but since all of this will go into a nice chassis with a nice preamp, I thought "why not go the extra mile and make things right".
