lusich

Thanks for the answer. I've been reading up on it a bit today. I also opened my dac25.3 for the first time Lot's of cool fascinating stuff in there. I managed to locate all of the parts discussed here in the forum and now the circuitry makes more sense to me. I also noted that the the USB chip in the dac is the Tenor TE7022L. I am curious if anyone thinks that there will be some kind of upgrade or kit available to replace/bypass the chip with the newer version such as TE8802L that would support USB Class 2 Audio protocol and USB transfers up to 24/196? ONe thing I noticed is that the TE8802L has a lot more pins than the TE7022L. This probably means, that the chip cannot simply be replaced on the existing board, right? http://www.gfec.com.tw/te8802l

Hi all, I am pretty new to all this electronics stuff. Could someone please explain to me what is the function of an "OpAmp"? Also what in the context of dac25.3 is a function of a vacuum tube? Do these two elements only serve function when you are using the unit as a "headphone amplifier"? I ask, because I am interested in the way the signal gets processed and how it gets sent to the (separate) integrated amplifier unit? I was under the impression that the function of a DAC is to simply convert the signal from digital to analog, and that no signal amplification happens at that stage. Please, could someone shed some light on this? Thanks!

also check out this post for more info how to do play bit-perfect without having to mess with conf files and pulseaudio http://www.head-fi.org/t/561961/bit-perfect-audio-from-linux

I would just like to post a link to this site http://www.head-fi.org/t/561961/bit-perfect-audio-from-linux which explains how to get bit-perfect sound on linux using other media players as well (and without having to remove pulseaudio -- which is somewhat difficult for non-experts).