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This weird trick lowers DAC distortion


mansr

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1 minute ago, mansr said:

Yes, cooling works best on parts designed to be cooled. What a surprise.

Yes it is a surprise but how many are conversant with the various packages available one wonders, but at least they can look up bottom terminated devices and get an idea now, wot a surprise....🤨

Yes, it also needs the PCB to be designed for doing such a job, thermal vias, copper coins etc. Even more fun when the board is in a sealed box, vacuum etc.

Peltier cooling with heat pipes can be a good DIY solution...

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On 1/19/2020 at 11:53 PM, mansr said:

The chip got covered in ice crystals. At a temperature of about -25 °C (according to thermal camera), the THD was some 5 dB lower than the starting point.


Those in the business of quantum computers should make quantum cooled DAC's, they know how to freeze chips ;)

Designer of the 432 EVO music server and Linux specialist

Discoverer of the independent open source sox based mqa playback method with optional one cycle postringing.

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On 1/19/2020 at 11:36 PM, fas42 said:

Amazing ... temperature differences make a difference - who would have thunk it? Those villainous circuit designers should be shot, for not getting this under control ...

Never knowing whether your serious or not, a look around and you would see people are working on it...

https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/electronicpackaging/issue/141/3

 

For a domestic DAC though does it matter if the noise is 120 or 125dB down one wonders.

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I should have added a question mark, would the noise reduction be noticeable after gain stages. The figures were arbitrary, but would cooling your device down to -25 be beneficial in regards to noise, or would the extra issues created by the cooling mechanisms not be beneficial. One knows its counting how many angels on a pin head, but it is also informative.

I sort of play about with cooling devices, these days due to size reduction power density has increased and heat is always an issues, smaller packaging, plastic cases, vacuum all create issues for heat removal. Cooling down to the level Mansr got to is a bit extreme, Jneutron on DIY Audio would be able to help here, or get the wife to stand there with a few cans of freezer spray during critical listening😁.

As to the use of "one" its a rather archaic English inflection, when we become the 51st state of America we will corect the abuse of the English language (banning all sensible phonetic spellings and re-introducing the long e).

One is not amused!😋

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5 minutes ago, marce said:

I should have added a question mark, would the noise reduction be noticeable after gain stages. The figures were arbitrary, but would cooling your device down to -25 be beneficial in regards to noise, or would the extra issues created by the cooling mechanisms not be beneficial. One knows its counting how many angels on a pin head, but it is also informative.

I sort of play about with cooling devices, these days due to size reduction power density has increased and heat is always an issues, smaller packaging, plastic cases, vacuum all create issues for heat removal. Cooling down to the level Mansr got to is a bit extreme, Jneutron on DIY Audio would be able to help here,

It's all rather pointless since we're talking about values around -110 dB (including output stages and ADC) anyway.

 

5 minutes ago, marce said:

or get the wife to stand there with a few cans of freezer spray during critical listening😁.

That won't do. Bad things happened during the actual spraying.

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On a serious note, what one loses in technical performance by any parasitic behaviour associated with temperature rise, is more than compensated by gains elsewhere - one of the obvious ones is that power supply smoothing caps work better, because ESR drops.

 

I have to laugh every time I see these "distortion makes it sound warmer and nicer" comments - ummm, no. Truly accurate, and not the output of rigs of good measuring components, sound is "warm and analogue like". Because, that it is the actual nature of the recording.

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