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Build Your Own CD?

I know people have tried to build their own passive preamps, tube amps, and tube preamps, and that companies offer kits for these purposes. As I look at home theater and digital (CD components and players) I get the sick feeling that they are all the same on the inside and just packaged differently. There seems to be no reason you could not buy a phillips transport, Crystal D/A and the rest of the stuff necessary to put in the box to make a kick-ass cd player (a D/A would seem even easier), so who amoung us has thought of this? SACD components seem obtainable as well. The only problem is the interconnection and compatibility of the various of digital components, but if someone could tell us what to connect, I believe that it could be done. I am not saying that we could build something as good as Wadia or Sony SACD, but hey, could we build something better than most of the stuff out there?
south_park
darkmoebius
900 posts
 
For Marantz cd 57, 60, 63, 67 and SE versions of each. They also have a complete DIY DAC project for die-hard tweaker, plus a cd-clock upgrades.
http://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/tweaks.html

Here's another using the Phillips 1252-10 cd engine
http://www.geocities.com/agalavotti/cdpro.htm

Here's another for a Technics SL-PG 580
http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~carnivor/cdp/cdp.html

This one has a bunch of DIY DAC's
http://www.diyaudio.de/

A 24/96 DAC
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Galaxy/6623/24bitdac.html

This DAC has a tubed out put & sells PCB's
http://www.megabaud.fi/~jtolonen/projects/projects.html

Tubed DAC w/ $125 PCB from SDS Labs
http://www.clarkson.edu/~stokessd/dac.html

Hope this helps prove that it's possible.
kublakhan
718 posts
 
darkmoebius, COOL post bruthah.
darkmoebius
900 posts
 
I don't have the skills yet, but I would love to make one of the tubed DAC's and see how it fairs against Aj! Tjoeb's line.

I'm currently doing my home work on building a set of 300B tubed monoblock amps and a tubed linestage pre-amp. Not only will it be challenging, but I could never afford the level of performance that I'll be able to build in. The amps should cost $1,200 US and the pre-amp is an Electric Tonalities Foreplay kit at $290 w/ full upgrades. The Foreplay can be tweaked to near "reference" performance. Who knows, though. I'll have to try it and see. I suppose after that, I'll need to try my hand at speakers.
turbodieselvw
48 posts
 
Found this quite some time ago but didn't remember about it till now. http://www.geocities.com/agalavotti/cdpro.htm
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