So I've wanted to fiddle with a USB DAC and flac files for a while and while trawling eBay I stumbled upon this cheapie and bid not thinking anything would come from it as it had a few days left. Turns out I won the auction, free shipping on the auction and the item arrived last friday.
It has a blue anodised enclosure which is really nothing special, I only discovered after opening it up that it has buttons on the board for volume up/down and mute and an LED to indicate its on. Plug it in, Windows XP and 7 recognizes it and installs a driver (I tried looking for an updated driver but found nothing). The vol up/down and mute control Windows's own volume control which is kinda cool. First thing I noticed was it was really quiet, zero hiss hum or even any noise whatsoever through the headphones to indicate it was even powered on. Using the only ok'ish pair of headphones I own (Senny HD202's) it sounds good, tried to do some A/B tests with the onboard card and the DAC but bar maybe a little hiss or interference from my cellphone when using the laptop's out maybe my headphones aren't good enough to pick up that sort of detail.
At first I had illusions of swopping components on it to see if I could hotrod it a little but after opening it the only non SMD stuff are 4 caps and an LED.
Specs according to the seller:
PCM2704 USB-DAC / sound card, size: 58 * 58 * 24MM (excluding terminals).
USB interface with Coaxial , fiber optic and analog output.
voltage:5 V (USB interface),
Distortion: THD+N: 0.006% (RL > 10 kω)
Distortion: THD+N: 0.025% (RL = 32 ω)
Signal-to-noise ratio: 98 dB
Dynamic range: 98 dB
Headphone output power: 12 mW (RL = 32 ω)
Supports sampling rates:16Bit 32k, 44.1k, 48k
It has made me want better cans though :rubhands:
