Don't take anything I say as gospel, I don't add nearly enough snake oil to my hifi recipes :-)
As noted before, my interest in all things Hi-Fi started with building amplifiers and other gadgets. And that's the way it will be, I'm as interested in playing with the bits as I am in listening to the results.
Jukka Tolonen built a Peak Level Meter using Indicator Tubes -- I think this will look so cool in a preamplifier. He also built a Tube DAC output stage.
An outboard DAC can improve on your CD player's built-in DAC in three (main) ways, namely reduced jitter on the digital side, a better filter, and a better analogue output stage. You can read up on this on Norbert Bayer and Marc Heijligers' pages (links below).
ESP has, in Rod Elliott's words, "quite possibly the simplest possible S/PDIF receiver and DAC you will ever find", using a CS8414 S/PDIF receiver and a CS4334 DAC.
The ESP DAC is a good starting point, but it does not address jitter on the input signal at all. The Cirrus (Crystal) CS8420 is a sample rate converter which can be used to completely isolate the DAC clock from the input signal clock and its jitter. Norbert Bayer's DAC4 and DAC5 use the CS8420.
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