AW-D1 Installation Memo
74AC74 and 74AC04 really do sound more detail than that of HC series on our system. But not until we get some access to the 54AC04 and 54AC74, wow, the difference is very great. All the details have been revealed. We do a lot of tweaks on your design hence the report came late. You know what, our system beats Elgar 972cs far away. We use very high quality of power supply, Holco resistors, WIMA Caps for coupling (digital parts). We use 6201 tube + Jensen Caps (Class A) output. Before that, we used LT1028 for the Analog output but it could not beat Elgar because we also did a lot of tweaks in Elgar to upgrade it. If we had not done modifications on Elgar before, we should have beaten this DAC much earlier.
The only sad things about this system is this system will not play 24bit 192K DVD-Audio while we have a test disc. But, the sound is very close to vinyl (I found it better thought while my friend is still worship vinyl) when we play true 24 bit 96K DVD-Audio. However, good sound does not come cheap, we spend about 6k in the system mostly on power supply parts and mostly Blackgate fk grade caps are used and we have four sets of power supplies to put into the system. All we got is the sound that we dream of warmth but with a lot of details, sounded like the singer is next to you and you can tell the position of the fingers on the bass.
Best of all, all the digital sound has gone and our ears feel very comfortable to the songs. The only tweak left on this system that we will be doing is to get a TCXO at 45.152M and to get supply of UCC caps.
