Jacken's Blog

This is the second part on how to improve the quality of an old CD player. You can find the first part here. In this section I’m going to show you how to install a better, more stable clock circuit into your 505. This particular clocks comes from Kingwa, that has a series of clocks for improving DVD players, CD players and DACs. The price is reasonable. I’ve installed them in three different units and had zero problems, so the quality seems good.

Ok, so why install a new clock? Isn’t there one in there already? Yes, your right. But by using better parts like crystals with lower ppm and also design a very clean power supply to feed the clock, you can make your player sound much better. And the reason is lower jitter.

But what is jitter? There is plenty of really good places to go read up on it. Here’s some.

http://www.audiocraftersguild.com/AandE/cd-jitter.pdf (PDF warning)

http://www.stereophile.com/reference/590jitter/

Ok, lets look at the schematic. Here you can see the clock and two capacitors, C404 and C403 and the clock is X401. The clock is feeding into the DAC (PD2029A) (you can find the complete schematic in part one)

We need to remove the crystal X401, and the two capacitors, C403 and C404. The old load capacitors are no longer needed. The next step is to connect the Kingwa clock to the DAC. As seen on the schematic, the clock is 16.9344Mhz, so we need to use the correct outlet from the Kingwa clock. There is three different divisions of the clock. You need to solder two connections. One for the ground, labeled GND, and the one just next to it, labeled 1/4F0.

Now we need to feed the signal generated from the new clock to the DAC. Connect one of them to the hole in C403 furthest away from the DAC. I put the GND line here. The other one should go where the old clock used to go. Use the one closest to the large capacitor for the DAC (see picture).

The Kingwa clock is going to need power. Any voltage between 10-30 V DC will do. I will have an upcoming article about the power supply I built for it. You will find the connectors for the power on the over side of the Kingwa clock.

Next step, testing. Put in a cd. If you have the cover removed when doing this REMEMBER DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE! No touchy touchy while doing this. Not on the part we soldered but on the power supply. Anyway, If you didn’t know this you really should not be doing this in the first place.

When you press power it should read the TOC from the CD. Press play. If the display shows the seconds ticking, you can turn the player off, unplugg and put the cover back on.

elgrandee

Why whould I need this?

All albums and songs are mixed differently. So in iTunes some albums sounds very loud whilst other is rather low. This has increased in something called the Loudness War. Producers of albums soon realized that if you mix an album really hot, it will sound louder then the other songs on crappy stereo equipment. So essentially you have a lot of music in your iPod/iPhone with albums recorded at totally different volume. That’s why you have to constantly change the volume knob to correct for this. Here Apple comes to the rescue with it’s Automatic Volume Settings. Unfortunately the algorithm Apple chose to use to determine the volume of the song is made to be quick, but not particularly accurate. This mean that the songs does come out all over the place volume vise.But there is an good solution to this problem, and it’s name is ReplayGain.

This is program that analyzes the music psycho acoustically and then makes an assessment on witch level the song/album should be. Unfortunately Apple haven’t embraced this techique even though it’s totally open. Shame on you Apple.

ReplayGain application

But there’s a sollution. An application called iVolume that goes though all your songs in iTunes and makes sure they have the same “level”. This mean that you can be certain in that you won’t have ear blead when a song of Sting ends and Mötörhead comes on.

The software is super easy to use, just start it and iTunes, make sure you have “Sound Check” enabled in preferences in iTunes. After that it’s just pushing a button.

One downside only, the price is $29.95 witch I think is a bit high. But for me It was a must, it transforms the pleasure of listening to music.

Jamison Judd

I found this great shell script to test your MySQL server. You need to have your MySQL server up and running a while before running the test to get valid data. With all the possible setting variations this is can be a handy tool.

Get MySQL Performance tuner here.

Just wasted a good half hour trying to find a migration tool in Google Apps Standard Edition. After a lot of searching, I found out that there is none. Tip to Google. Write this in your guide!

So back to proven trusted tools like IMAPSync

Lenn-Art Subwoofer

Last time I ordered some speaker elements from Germany I ordered some extra Tang Band W8-740C subwoofer elements for a later build. I’ve been oogling this design to go with my home-built ProAc 2.5 clones. Micke, a friend will make the boxes for me, provided I sent him the drawings. What an exellent excuse to try to learn Solidworks. Amazing program. I have designed my own version of the venerable GainClone amplifier with a beefed up power supply and will use two subwoofers in stereo. Nice to not have to build the boxes. Last time when I built the clones the apartment was filled with MDF dust for months.

I’ve had some bizarre problems with my DNS today. I checked /etc/resolv.conf but everything looked ok. Checked the settings dialog for my network and at first glance, that one seemed ok as well.

But normally there should be a dimmed version of the DHCP assigned values there.

Just select the empty one and press the minus sign. Sneaky little bug there!

Save your settings and you should be good to go.

I’m going to do the last installations tomorrow. And finally start measuring my listening-room so I can create a DRC setup. I’ve done some experiments, and the sound improvement is amazing! So there’s going to be a lot of sweep sounds in my apartment tomorrow.

There’s a problem with getting Perian to work in Snow Leopard. But there’s a quick fix outlined here, but If the PreferencePane is installed to only the current user, you need to paste the following into the terminal: