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.

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 lot of articles on the net about modding and enhancing the sound quality of your audio equipment by replacing components etc. But you never see measurements to backup their claims. Well, I’ve been busy the last two days taking a ten year old middle range CD player and trying to make it to sound really good. But I also have done measurements before and after doing the mod (within reason) and so far it actually confirms that modding really works (if done right). Now, let’s face it, the best measured equipment isn’t necessarily the one that sounds the best, but still, it’s interesting to see what kind of effects different modifications have.My best sounding DAC does not measure as well as some other ones I have. And I have started to get quite the collection.

Will be back with a writeup and test diagrams when I’m finished…

Over a year ago this guy contacted me to get permission to use this picture for an album cover. I sent him a high res copy and told him that he could use the picture but that he had to send me a copy of the album when it was finished. My guess was I would never hear from him again. But to my surprise I got an email from him yesterday asking for my address and if I wanted the album signed by the artist! Things like this makes me believe in the human being again. I just assumed he would forget to send the album, which is what I probably would do.

I don’t think they used used ReplayGain.

The people who adds music type tagging at Spotify must be on crack. You select “Alternative, Punk, Hard Rock” and sometimes you get like pop songs for 14 year olds. Very irritating. I know that people really mark up some tags weird, but this is ridiculous.

For probably 20 years I’ve been searching for a song. An old friend of mine, Micke Fredriksson used to play this punk song from a live recording. The only thing I remembered was that they sang “They called me an animal, then they cut me up”. So sometimes I searched the net for the text, but could never find out the name of the song. Irritating!

But today I went to a vinyl record sale and I found it! As soon as I saw the album cover I knew that it was the right one. So now I can finally listen to Art Attacks masterpiece Animal Bondage

The last couple of years due to the iPod, I’ve listened to more music than ever before. I also haven’t bought much music. But in the last six month I bought a lot of CDs and now also vinyl records. I would never pay full price for a CD, in Sweden you pay around $18! But I do buy nice price CDs. Then I have to pay around $5. And vinyl can be even cheaper. Hopefully the record industry will finally get it and change their pricing so I don’t have to buy back catalog all the time.