The ES9038Pro DAC Nightmare (Did My Dedicated Oscillator Mod Kill my DAC? NLOCK)

[JohnSwenson]

Is the oscillator in the picture the original one? It clearly shows 100MHz, but the one you linked to is 16.9344. That seems like it could cause some significant malfunction, but that should not cause anything to be permanently damaged.

 

Adding an AC powered board in parallel to a transformer powering another AC powered board should not inherently cause a problem. It could cause the voltage on the transformer to droop which might have caused a problem with some circuitry not working properly, but again that will not usually permanently harm something. 

 

Given you have a display that shows messages etc it sounds like there is a processor of some sort, it is theoretically possible that a low voltage on the processor could cause it corrupt its firmware. It's unlikely but it IS possible. If that is the case you would need to reload the firmware. I have no idea if that is even possible with your DAC.

 

John S.

[JohnSwenson]

First off I would get the data sheets for the original and the new clock board and make sure the output voltage for both. Most oscillators are 3.3V output, but there are a few chips that use a lower voltage clock. If you feed such a clock input with a 3.3V clock you COULD fry it. (don't ask me how I know this!)

 

Do you have a scope? My next debugging would be to check the signals going into the DAC chip look good, then look at the outputs and see if they look reasonable.

 

You can try tracing the clock signal from the oscillator to the DAC chip and see if there is anything in-between (chip, resistors etc). If there is, THAT might have been damaged by the new board.

 

Swapping that DAC chip is not an easy task if you are not familiar with the process. Make SURE nothing else is wrong before tackling it.

 

If you don't have a scope, now would be a very good time to get one!

 

John S.