I needed a balanced DAC for the workbench for testing and whatnot, so I threw this together from a board I made for another project and a block of padauk I've had sitting around for years. My only woodworking tool is a drill press with a forstener bit, so this is the extent of what I can do at home over the weekend.

DAC is a straight forward CS8416->SRC4192->WM8741. Power supply is a cheapo 15V wallwart followed by a LM317 at 11V and then 5x 3.3V regs and 1x 5V reg for the circuit. The outputs are straight off the chip, so no opamps, no caps, no buffers, etc. This works here as everything I build that can take a balanced input is transformer coupled, so the output sitting up a few volts is not an issue. This chip won't drive a 600 ohm transformer, but it is plenty happy into a 10K. I have always been skeptical of voltage out chips, based largely on my experience with an old CAL DAC that used one and that is just terrible. But, this chip is really pretty nice.

Board and schematic images.

Last Update:Wednesday, 03-Mar-2010 03:12:44 EST