I was wonder if it's reasonable to hack it and improve it's performance, as it should be do-able.
Since Emotiva MC-1 has a lot of similarity to Tonewinner AT-300, and AT-300 also shares it's core board to other line of product,
I was able to find the diagrams of AT-2300, and it shows signal path was transmitted from ADSP-21753 into CS42518 via I2S.
CS42518 being a multi-purpose codec, might be one of culprit this machine performs not as expected (along with basic power supply and reasons).
▼ Diagrams of AT-2300 audio path (
Original page)
But since the DSP is outputting I2S signal, and the pinout easily tracked thanks to the datasheet, we could tap out the signal and hook up to external DAC for better quality,
say ES9038Q2M DIY HAT kit to make everything internal, and with reclock buffer in between to reduce jitter (
FIFO Reclock),
though everything will still be resampled to 48KHz as the DSP is programmed that way,
We can even hook up to external DSP eg. ADAU1701 via I2S, to digitally EQ and distribute, say 4 subwoofer outputs.
▼ Dual ES9038Q2M balanced output kit using I2S input
The only thing I'm concerning with this hack is, at the near end of diagrams, there's NJU72340A whose job is volume control, and I'm not sure if it interact with TRIM feature or just master volume or even just mixing, so you might need to route the output back into the circuit, requiring some scary bit of cutting circuit and such.
Hence the title of my question, is it reasonable to do this hack if I want to improve the performance of this machine?