Thanks for joining the forum
@montesquieu 
. You have a great looking room & an amazing devotion to vinyl! I'm also a fan of Miyajima cartridges, especially the Madake & Zero. One question, with your modded AN kit dac, what level AN dac do you think it is roughly equivalent to? Or were the mods for a particular level? Cheers.
The AN kit DAC as currently modded in terms of the components used was intended to land somewhere between AN DAC 3.1x and 4.1x level ... I compared it back to back at a get-together with both factory models and that classification turned out to be pretty accurate. It was last upgraded 5 years ago.
The work being done will transform the power supply section of the DAC with a larger, much more sophisticated arrangement quite different to anything in the Audio Note world. To fit it all in, the new case is 460mm wide x 550mm deep x 230mm high - that's approx 18in x 22in x 9in high - AN Meishu sized and almost certainly heavier than a Meishu. The digi board will be left largely as-is (it's already been heavily upgraded with black black gate-n and fancy resistors) but the analogue board will be reconfigured from using 5687s to 6072, as used in the higher-end AN factory stuff. Part of the PSU complexity will be providing power to a tube input buffer which aims to achieve the same as the one in the AN Fifth Element/Fifth Force/top-end Lampis. There will also be a USB-SPDIF reclocker/converter, tube powered and with tube buffered output, that module is coming pre-built from Zulfugarov Abbas in Ukraine but will have its components worked over in line with the other improvements ... that's the only thing that's coming pre-made the rest either uses/modifies the original equipment or that from previous upgrades, or is being scratch built.
Finally it will have the best output transformers that can be purchased (it already has the highest quality i/v transformer availble from Hifi Collective), and of course will be stuffed with Black Gates and other tasty passive components, some of which have been collected over the course of 5 years for this upgrade. Multiple inputs (BNC, RCA, XLR, USB) will be available from a relay switch, and the tube buffer will be able to be engaged, or bypassed with input instead going via the standard audio note 1:1 digital input transformer - this to ensure that the best sounding method can be selected for any particular input.
Essentially I'm hoping for at least DAC5 performance from all this, possibly better. It will be fed for the moment by my long-suffering AN CDT2/II and a Macbook with JRiver. (Looking possibly at a CEC TL3 to replace the AN transport, which might also be modded with a tube buffer on the output). Although the AD1865 DAC chip used in the AN kit as well as in all higher end models in the AN range is capable of 24/96, I anticipate it will overwhelmingly be used for Red Book 16/44.
I deliberately stuck with indirectly heated double triodes as the Lampis I have heard have not convinced me on DHT for DAC purposes, with their high gain and all-round temperamental nature (heat, microphonics, fragility) as well as all the hassles either of finding good NOS tubes from the 20s, 30s and 40s or of paying the likes of EMT huge sums for new equivalents. A shoot-out is planned with at least one diehard Lampi fan once I get the DAC back. The PSU section will be modified from a design the (non-commercial) builder has done for himself which was built around an AN kit and the 45 valve - I have heard his DAC and it's truly stunning, but I wanted something different for my own version.
I'm not a huge digital listener, if faffing needs to be done give me vinyl any day ... digital is 10% of my listening and of that streaming is less than 10% - indeed I find the streaming user experience a total turn off, the idea of clicking at lists and using a screen to listen to music seems ALL WRONG to me. In fact if I think about it I put more hours in in a year listening to 78s than I do on streaming. We'll see if that changes when my streaming capabilities improve (but I doubt it somehow).
