Mike P
Trade: Pickwell Audio
Here I go again...
My newest project is a rebuild of a classic Philips DAC960, which I've taken on for @k90tour (Richard).
Richard was already quite smitten with the Philips but wanted to check if it I could squeeze a bit more performance out of it. I'm glad he did because there are some very substantial gains to be had (read on).
I'm really not sure where to begin with the one, except to say that it must be one of the strangest and most perplexing jobs I've ever dealt with!
Someone else has been at Richard's DAC960 before me and they went berserk replacing everything they could. And I really do mean everything. The bizarre thing is that they've replaced stuff without any consideration as to whether or not it needed replacing, or if there's any benefit in replacing it. And they've simply replaced parts based on the value without any consideration of the type. For example, they might have replaced a film cap with a ceramic etc.
Here's an overview of Richard's DAC960
20210512_091746 by Michael Pickwell, on Flickr
And here's a pic of the internals of my Marantz CDA94 to show you how it looked when in left the factory (more or less).
20210512_091750 by Michael Pickwell, on Flickr
As you can see the whole thing has been 'carpet bombed' with the same blue BC Components caps. I'm certainly not against recapping a piece of kit that's this old but the capacitors they've used are not up to the same quality as the originals. The DAC960 deserves better and I shall be taking most of these back out and replacing them with top quality and better sounding top spec audio grade capacitors (like it had originally).
My newest project is a rebuild of a classic Philips DAC960, which I've taken on for @k90tour (Richard).
Richard was already quite smitten with the Philips but wanted to check if it I could squeeze a bit more performance out of it. I'm glad he did because there are some very substantial gains to be had (read on).
I'm really not sure where to begin with the one, except to say that it must be one of the strangest and most perplexing jobs I've ever dealt with!
Someone else has been at Richard's DAC960 before me and they went berserk replacing everything they could. And I really do mean everything. The bizarre thing is that they've replaced stuff without any consideration as to whether or not it needed replacing, or if there's any benefit in replacing it. And they've simply replaced parts based on the value without any consideration of the type. For example, they might have replaced a film cap with a ceramic etc.
Here's an overview of Richard's DAC960
20210512_091746 by Michael Pickwell, on Flickr
And here's a pic of the internals of my Marantz CDA94 to show you how it looked when in left the factory (more or less).
20210512_091750 by Michael Pickwell, on Flickr
As you can see the whole thing has been 'carpet bombed' with the same blue BC Components caps. I'm certainly not against recapping a piece of kit that's this old but the capacitors they've used are not up to the same quality as the originals. The DAC960 deserves better and I shall be taking most of these back out and replacing them with top quality and better sounding top spec audio grade capacitors (like it had originally).