Lampizator BEST300B DAC, User Manual

Page: 10 / 24

! 10
LampizatOr- BEST300B DAC Manual
COOPERATION WITH THE PREAMP
The load presented by the preamp or amp or simply the next analog component that
the DAC sees, should be as high as possible. It is measured in kilo-Ohms and 100Kilo
Ohms is a perfect ballpark value. More is VERY rarely seen. 47 K is next common
value, and it is great too. 20 K is kind of on a low side, but we can handle that. Lower
than 10k is bad news.
The DAC will not be damaged in any way, but at around 10K of load the dynamics of
the dac will start to fade away.
Having said that - every properly designed amp or preamp keeps the load value above
40k. And if it doesn’t - we simply don’t choose such amp because it was not designed
with audiophiles in mind.
DIGITAL INPUTS
There are three data types that our DAC can read internally: biphase, i2s and USB.
The bi-phase can come in many forms, but the most common are:
S/PDIF (Sony/Philips data inter face) by means of single ended square wave of
amplitude around 0,5 V pp
AES/EBU - the same as S/PDIF but the signal is a mirrored (balanced) pair of square
waves around 2,5 V pp (max. 5 V pp)
TOSLINK - a fiber optic transmission of S/PDIF producing at the DAC the 5 V TTL
electrical signal.
The TOSLINK connection
Is toslink bad or not ? That is the question. Like everything in life - it can be bad or it can
be good.
By using own experiments and oscilloscope observations we concluded, that Toslink is not
bad and not inferior to RCA SPDIF if implemented properly. Toslink is EXTREMELY
demanding about the power supply quality. That’s why we build for toslink separate
dedicated power supply and with this supply the response is instantaneous and there is no
deformation of square wave. Usually Toslink ports are installed in cheap low end gear and
the power supply to Toslink is completely neglected. Not in LampizatOr DAC. If you have
Toslink in your DAC you can be sure it will sound good and not degrade the sound. Of
course providing that the transmitter part of the link is at least semi decent.
NOTE: All Apple products which have headphone output (iMac, MacBook, Power MAC,
MAcMini, iPhone, iPad, iPod) - have a secret toslink transmitter hidden inside that port.
Just buy the special cable - Toslink Minijack and when placed in the headphone output of
an Apple product - will emit light with SPDIF in it. That is a very good way of using MAC
computers as transports.
! of ! 10 24