A new TDA1541A DAC lives in 2025

[sbelyo]

The first completed DIY project in 3 years and in my new workshop lives!  

It's a battery powered Philips TDA1541A based stereo DAC,  About 18 months ago I needed something to kick start me back into DIY after breaking down my old setup and moving to Florida.  So I built a 10'x11' room in one of the garage bays and proceeded to slowly unpack.  I ran across a few threads about the TDA1541 and became curious.  This is what I settled on for the first try.  It's on a test board I put together so I could mess with different power supplies and experiment with controlling relays to turn the power on and off.

 

It's sounds surprisingly good!  Very easy to listen to, the vocals are up front and full of details.  It's only been running for about an hour so the highs are a little bright but we'll see what happens after a few days.  I'm also feeding it an I2S signal from a PCIE to I2S bridge that's running off the switcher in the PC so I'm hoping a better PSU for the bridge will add further improvements.  I have what I need for a balanced setup and then two chips paralleled in a balanced config so that along with a display for the Arduino are coming.

 

Let the flames begin!

[Pars]

I saw some of your traffic over on diya regarding this. What/whose board of scheme did you wind up going with for this?

[sbelyo]

I went with https://gabster.ca/Gabster-TD1/  You need one for stereo, two for balanced.  I also have a set of ryanj's board but haven't built it yet

You need -5, +5 , and +15V supplies and some way to feed it a PCM signal.  I chose https://iancanada.ca/products/9-i2s-to-pcm-converter-board-v2-0

I fed that board right from my PC with an I2S bridge but any USB to I2S solution should work.  You can take it up a notch and build an I2S streamer from that iancanada site.  I will go that route once I put together the final config.

 

I'll give you a hand if you want to give it a shot

[Pars]

Probably not going to do anything. I'm pretty sure that I prefer PCM to DSD. I still really like the Res. Audio Opus 21 I bought, and still have my Rotel RCD-991 (PCM63) and RCD-855 (TDA1541A) if needed. I use the 991 as a transport for the Opus as the shitty DVD drives they used back in the 2000's given most of the good mechs had been disco'd by that time leave a lot to be desired. I can't tell any difference in sound between the internal drive on the Opus vs. the Rotel -> S/PDIF -> Opus.

I did build one of Pedja Rogic's AYA DAC something or other back in the day. @morphsci has that or at least did.