BeePree w/ Integrated DAC

andrewoliverhall · 1242

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Offline andrewoliverhall

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on: February 01, 2016, 07:52:29 PM
Just wanted to post this in case anyone else is interested in putting a DAC inside a BeePree.  I've built a few bottlehead kits but by no means am a professional, so you'll have to go easy on me.

The DAC I chose is the the DIY gamma2 ( google: "gamma2 amb" ) from amb.org, with the associated sigma11 power supply.  You buy the PCB and a few parts from them, then go get the rest on mouser/digikey.  Great little design with lots of options and high quality components.  I'm sure it's not as good as the bottlehead one though!

I hijacked the first pair of RCA inputs for use as a SPDIF coax and mini usb.  There is a toggle switch mounted on the front panel to switch between the two.  I abandoned the optical port option because you can convert from optical to coax easily and I couldn't find a panel mount optical receiver.  Can't notice any hum of ill effects on the analog audio from the addition of the dac power supply... so far so good, it sounds great.

It ended up being probably $300 with the upgraded power supply, I think.  That's with carefully stripping out a bunch of the parts you would need for the standalone unit.  But of course I made various mistakes along the way and had to reorder things plenty of times, especially the SMDs, so there's no telling what I paid.  Anyway if anyone is interested in undertaking this project I can provide more details - if I forget about the frustrations of actually building it, it worked out really well.  Got it hooked up to an apple airport express so I can stream wirelessly from my any apple device to the BeePree ( with whatever crappy compressed digital format that uses internally... but we'll ignore that ).

Now that that's all done with, I'll go back to listening to my vinyl.