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Hifi Forum TDA-1541A DAC Review

Rate this DAC:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 95 48.0%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 67 33.8%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 26 13.1%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 10 5.1%

  • Total voters
    198

DivineCurrent

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My old man got a Nakamichi stereo system with the Nakamichi CDP-2A, which used this exact same TDP-1541A DAC. Sounded pretty damn good to me when I listened to it with high end speakers and headphones, especially for something made in the 80s. Not that I believe in DAC sound differences, but it must be close to audibly transparent for CD quality tracks.
 
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DavidK442

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What an obscure piece to test. I thought there was a back log? Maybe you have worked yourself right out of a … Oh never mind. This is a labor of love so test what ever you want and we will just be happy for as long as you want to keep doing it.
Happy New Year and here’s to many more.
 

fastfreddy666

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My first CD player was a Philips CD350 (2 x TDA1540 14 Bit + SAA7030 digital filter IC) It was a hand-me-down from my six year older brother because he bought a newer more fancier one. A Sony CDP-68 (1 x Philips TDA1541 & CXD1088). The filter chip is much better. (2)

I was over the moon with it. It was so much better than Vinyl. The disk itself was also less susceptible to scratches and if they were present the CRC (cyclic redundancy check) usually did a good job masking or correcting those errors. I'm very careful with handling my CDs and vinyl records. I even bought special inner sleeves with anti-static plastic inside. I once made a stupid mistake to lend a LP to a friend. It came back with a scratch on side B. Scratches on LPs give those very annoying impulse noises. (sharp, very brief and high amplitude. like a fire cracker). Needless to say we aren't friends anymore.. The album in question was "A Saucerful Of Secrets" by Pink Floyd published in 1968 a year before I was born. Luckily the scratch wasn't on my favorite track "Jugband Blues". My dad bought it and he didn't like it. You got to bekidding me. So he gave it to me when he gave me his old turntable Dual 1224 (vintage 1973). For the people in the know it had a piezo electric cartridge with a diamond stylus. In disc jockey jargon, the stylus, and sometimes the entire cartridge, is often called the needle. Vinyl enthusiasts will probably laugh at you if you use that colloquial term.

A few years later (1889-1991. Don't know exactly) i had a Technics SL1200 direct drive (vintage 1976), a-hand-me-down from my dad who was also into Hi-fi and an unrepentant gear-head and my most priced possession was a Nakamichi BX300 Three Head Dual Capstan Stereo Cassette Deck (Already obsolete at the time but I loved the pitch control and Dolby C). And a very old and probably broken Philips receiver (It had a hum problem and if you turned the volume knob it made crackling noises. This was probably caused by a dirty potentiometer but i couldn't be bothered repairing it)

Some background..... The 16 bit conversion system with the 14 bit TDA1540 Converter system worked with 4 x oversampling.
tda1540.png


The digital part in the conversion is done by the SAA7030 IC. (very crude interpolating one). The 16 bit input is four times oversampled followed by a FIR filter. The output of the filter is 28 bits. The output of the filter is subsequently matched to 14 bit by means of a first order noise shaper. This "trick" will result in the same in band quantizing SNR (QSNR) as from a 16 bit converter. After the conversion there's a spurious response at 176.4 Khz present (duh) in the hold circuit of the D/A. This is removed by a third order Bessel–Thomson filter because we don't want to introduce any group delay distortion. This is followed by a low order low cost analog linear phase filter. If they didn't had used oversampling they would have been forced to use a high order low pass filter to suppress the 44.1 +/- 20 Khz lobe and they are relatively complicated (many terms) to implement and expensive to make in hardware. The end result was that CD-players got a lot more affordable.

I was only 18 or 19 and I didn't have a fancy stereo (yet). The first thing I bought from my part-time job were the The Mission 70 MkIIs bookshelf speakers. Even then I already knew that the speakers are always the most important of the whole system. I thought they sounded nice with plenty of bass for their size (3).

The word audiophile wasn't used (by us) back in the day. Hi-fi is not be confused with Hi-End. The saying "you get what your pay for" isn't valid (anymore). There's plenty of cheap gear out there that performs better. Some Hi-End has better build quality and aesthetics. But as my mother always says "It's what's inside that counts" It's a cliché but they're often true. And beauty is in the eye of the beholder....

Before you buy a new DAC. Invest in some decent speakers first. I recommend buying some active ones so you don't have to invest in an amplifier.

(1) datasheet http://vasiltech.narod.ru/files/SAA7030.pdf
(1) datasheet: https://www.alldatasheet.com/view_datasheet.jsp?Searchword=CXD1088
(2) https://www.whathifi.com/features/old-speakers-vs-new-speakers-how-do-they-compare
Take these impressions with a a few pounds of salt because they're subjective. They were recommended to me by my local hi-fi shop salesman. They would cost $269 a piece now if you take inflation into account. That was a lot of money for me during that time but
definitely worth it.
 
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DHT 845

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This from another “audiophile” brand, same deal just a couple years earlier
from my memory, that CEC transport "deconstruction" by Lukasz was also interesting
 

McFly

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This from another “audiophile” brand, same deal just a couple years earlier
I know this is going off topic, but h o l y f***.

Surely that's not just Mike Moffat taking the piss out of the audiophiles? (was that Mike Moffat of schiit audio, when he worked/headed theta digital??)

I really hope it is, because if it is, its hilarious. That'd be better than that story about all the reviewers losing it over the unknown "orange speaker cables" at that audio show that turned out to be cut up mains extension leads because they'd forgotten to bring speaker cables.


Back on topic: For what its worth I couldn't tell the difference between this DAC and my Schiit Modius.
 

JEntwistle

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This from another “audiophile” brand, same deal just a couple years earlier

Oh, poor guy!

I don't know anything about these specific brands - Theta and Lexicon - but isn't this just an admission that there is no "secret sauce"? You either engineer it or you don't.

I can't imagine who at the companies greenlighted these products.
 

McFly

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To bad he didn’t send the fake one in as well. Would love to see the performance on that one compared to a real one.
I'm no expert, not even close, but thinking more on this I would wager its probably quite easy to buy any modern cheap delta-sigma DAC chip and encase it within the "TDA1541A" shell as the Philips chip is quite big by todays standards, and one would probably get better results! Definitely would be cool to see the fakes performance!
 
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amirm

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What an obscure piece to test. I thought there was a back log?
There is a significant backlog. But this thing is not obscure. The box is but not the DAC chip used in it. Tons and tons of people are seeking these early Philips DACs and playing with them now. Hence the reason I accepted to test it.
 

aj625

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This confirms my suspicions of digital gear producing analog sound. I often read the virtues of antique DAC chips producing analog sound (original Sony Playstation console, etc) is they dumb down the source signal so much it is comparable to analog sound reproduction. With a corresponding loss of detail and clarity.
Yes exactly. The so called notion that r2r dacs sound more analog comes from the fact that these dacs have poor detail retrieval and have poor linearity. That gives the impression of analog feel. Imo one can make any modern sota DS dac to sound r2r like. The method is simple. You take a 24bit pcm file. Remove last 16bit by truncation without dither and after that pad those 16bits with zeros. So effectively you have only 8bit of information. (if you convert this padded file to wav it will have same size of original 24bit wav, flac size will reduce drastically because last 16bits are zero. So padding zeros and making wav is to disguise to r2r dac lovers :p ) Now play this file through sota DS dac and voila your sota DS starts sounding like R2R dac. :p
 
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PeteL

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Yes exactly. The so called notion that r2r dacs sound more analog comes from the fact that these dacs have poor detail retrieval and have poor linearity. That gives the impression of analog feel. Imo one can make any modern sota DS dac to sound r2r like. The method is simple. You take a 24bit pcm file. Remove last 16bit by truncation without dither and after that pad those 16bits with zeros. So effectively you have only 8bit of information. (if you convert this padded file to wav it will have same size of original 24bit wav, flac size will reduce drastically because last 16bits are zero. So padding zeros and making wav is to disguise to r2r dac lovers :p ) Now play this file through sota DS dac and voila your sota DS starts sounding like R2R dac. :p
Where do you get the idea that R2R reproduce only 8 bits? That’s not the case.
 
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amirm

amirm

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My first generation Technics/Panasonic that I bought in 1982 or 1983, had a single mono DAC module that was being switched back and forth to create the output for both channels! So yes, we had DACs then but pretty rudimentary in early days.
 

pseudoid

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Not even @amirm can measure the enjoyment this project must award its owner, each time he sits down to enjoy this creation.
The subtle things that this owner can detect/decode about its character would be impossible to duplicate in anyone else's ear-to-brain bridge.
 

aj625

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Where do you get the idea that R2R reproduce only 8 bits? That’s not the case.
Don't be so naive ! There is no reason to be offended here . Check the linearity measurements of R2R dacs on asr !
 

aj625

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CD players came to market in 1982, so yes, obviously they had DACs. The converter chip in this is from then, that’s the whole idea of this review.
So now you understood what I wanted to say ? Since this is a pure dac devoid of cd playback it couldn't have been made in 80s. It's a new product but with old dated tech.
 

pseudoid

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We were already doing DAC/ADCs for secure voice comm back in late '70s.
If you think 'just' 16bits is audibly inferior, our sampling rates were tip of the technology back then @2.4kHz.
If I am not mistaken some of the very first Sony CD pressings were either 14 or 15bit... but definitely not 16bits.
 

PeteL

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Don't be so naive ! There is no reason to be offended here . Check the linearity measurements of R2R dacs on asr !

Nobody’s offended, we need to not spread disinformation that’s all.
 
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aj625

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Nobody’s offended, we need to not spread disinformation that’s all.
wow posting reviews as per your convenience. did you even check linearity of pagoda dac? or schiit bifrost dac ? or audio gd r2r11 ? these are measured in this forum. and are they by any means 80s dac ? can you explain how r2r dacs are better despite poor measurements ? for your ready reference.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...nd-review-of-schiit-bifrost-multibit-dac.2319


 
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