Sound card DAC tutorial

[Guyfromhe]

Thanks for the heads-up. I sent him a PM. It would be awesome sauce if I could get a deal on it.. otherwise I am going to have to use something free or write my own for the time being.

 

[kiyoukan]

So its a sad day today.
My sound card has died.
It was an old beast, It was an original cm board not that whimpy L new one.
But it gave its final performance...

Well enough crying for one night.
so i was thinking of going with Best Connectivity SD-AUD20040 7.1 Channel USB 2.0 Sound Box
The sound card that Bionic-Badger found.
Im going to place the order Sunday night, but wanted to know if this new card is better than my old dead card or the flea bay cards
USB 6 Channel 5.1 External Audio Sound Card For Laptop | eBay
And i think im going to switch over to using ribbon cable, it just looks so much better.
Also that +-12v drop in in the op is out of stock got any others?
Well crap im still crying... my beams are no longer. and shaking mirrors isnt the same...

 

[carmangary]

I'm not sure I understand.

 

[Benm]

Just get the same one you had before if that worked well.

You will not notice any difference in projection quality when you use a more expensive model next time. Even the cheapest DACs have specifications that will outclass any compensation amp or galvo driver by several orders of magnitude.

 

[kiyoukan]

hmm well i think im going to go with the new one.
they dont sell the model that i have any way.
But i would like to replace my +-9 with the 12.
found the replacement at digi key
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?lang=en&site=US&KeyWords=NKA0512SC&x=17&y=19

 

[Bionic-Badger]

I made the stupid decision to try and and put a tantalum capacitor into the circuit with the +/- 12V supply, and not knowing the polarity of the caps (or that they were polarized at all), it shorted, smoked and fried the $8 part. :\

Now that I think about it, it was pretty pointless to add the cap in the first place...

On that new sound card. I'm sure it's the same thing; just more channels you can work with. I would've gotten the other one, but I wanted to get one from Amazon.com. Just make sure your Sound settings are set to full dynamic range on all channels and you'll be good to go, even on Windows 7.

 

[LaserAdct]

Hi all.

I recently build a DAC based on the Audiolase board. I spent a few hours looking for info about the soldering points on the DX soundcard since the LaserBoy version is slightly different (different colors on the cables). I took some pictures and wanted to add to this post how everything is hooked up. It might save someone a else a few hours of searching and reading up :thinking:

1) Connecting everything..
The following pictures explains the connection of the colored ribbon cable to the soundcard pretty well. + a few extra pictures that show a neat solution to hooking the board to the soundcard casing.

!IMPORTANT! Solder the 4 usb wires to the soundcard, BUT ONLY connect it to the Audiolase board if your soundcard is connected to the Computer on an USB port that can not deliver the required voltage for the soundcard to operate. I learned this the hard way by connecting the cable eventhough the soundcard was getting power by its own USB cable. The result was that the found new hardware dialog kept popping up and then vanished on and off again and again since it made the soundcard go into an infinite power on/off loop

2) Tuning the board

Tuning the output on each channed (X,Y,R,G,B,I) is pretty straight forward. I followed drlavas instructions from the first post.

I am running Win7 Ultimate and everything is working as it should. What I did was hook up the soundcard to my pc which made windows install a default driver. Then I installed the App/driver from the CD that came along with the soundcard. I did not remove the driver windows installed prior to this. In windows I configged the soundcard to use 7.1 surround, and in the soundcard program i set it to 5.1. Important to do so since setting windows to other than that have given some problems to others (channels being distributed otherwise than expected which resulted in a lot more tweaking to be done in the show software).

I made a small interface board which made it easy to measure the voltage on each channel while playing max.wav (5V) and while silent (0V).

That was about it. I hope someone will find this useful :yh:


Best regards

 

[paulzimm]

Looking good! A few months ago I upgraded from a home-built Sound Card DAC with Spaghetti to Pangolin QuickShow 2 with the Flash Back controller. I will probably be selling my Sound Card DAC very soon along with my license to Spaghetti. Your looks great, good job!

 

[carmangary]

I'm not sure I understand.

 

[whatsupadrian]

Looking good! A few months ago I upgraded from a home-built Sound Card DAC with Spaghetti to Pangolin QuickShow 2 with the Flash Back controller. I will probably be selling my Sound Card DAC very soon along with my license to Spaghetti. Your looks great, good job!

I bet it was like night and day. I been playing with the QS demo will probably do the exact same thing next week... Unfortunately we got burned on the spaghetti deal. I can't wait for my QS.

 

[kiyoukan]

How did you get burned?^

How are they not?
Are they locked to a machine?
Or is it in the eula?
if its just a eula then they are transferable but it would be breaking the agreement.
Unless its hardware locked to more than just the hardware id it can still be transferred.

 

[whatsupadrian]

How did you get burned?^

How are they not?
Are they locked to a machine?
Or is it in the eula?
if its just a eula then they are transferable but it would be breaking the agreement.
Unless its hardware locked to more than just the hardware id it can still be transferred.

The key is locked to the machine.

Download the QS demo and you will understand...

 

[kiyoukan]

do you know that the code on the machine can be changed right?
But thats a whole different topic there.
That will not be talked about openly.
I dont want to download something i cant afford when i fall in love....

 

[carmangary]

I'm not sure I understand.

 

[kiyoukan]

hmm what happened to the theme the whole page is white?
So what happens to the users who paid for it and upgrade their gpu or cpu and no longer can use the software they paid for?
You just going to run and tell them to bad?
Everyone might want to make a Virtualmachine of their comps with a hardware spoof lock.
That way it will always work.
Its a sad day but things happen and people change.
Maybe its time to turn the keys over to a new person who would not be sick of it?
Im sure you know a few coders who could breath new life into the software.

 

[chipdouglas]

^^^ agreed. I purchaswd spaghetti recently. I hope im not screwed

carman, I hope you arent saying that you will lock existing owners out.