On Monday, April 22, 2019 at 5:18:06 PM UTC-4, Flasherly wrote:
Took apart the DAC I like and looked for the chip nomenclatures.

No wonder I kept telling myself the thing was special, either that or
my ears were growing aesthetics.

Tracked it to all over hifi forums and Ebay in kit form.

This one is minor, apart from knowing what the end of a soldering iron
means when going after the Cirrus Logic chip:
http://pavouk.org/hw/modulardac/en_cs8416spdif.html

CS8416 kits on ebay, a couple go similar, but most are totally nuts in
much higher relative build complexity. (And, as a courtesy, offer to
do the surface mounting.)

Messes with me. How in the hell can a little chip like that on a
TOSLINK light-carrier cable make sound so damn good.

You a electronics hobbyist? I wish I could have picked your brains when I was trying to construct a linear actuator for my Philippines chicken egg incubator. Long story short, you can construct a 'lost motion' linkage so that the rotational drive shaft of an electric motor drives something back and forth (think of those old Western movie locomotives), but to create, even using Raspberry Pi kits, an arm that goes back and forth, like a piston, is very difficult, and after a couple of weeks of inquiry, pretty much impossible, which led me to believe the entire Raspberry Pi movement was bogus. If they can't even design a linear actuator, how good can they really be?

I ended up getting a boy--labor is cheap in the Philippines, especially out in the countryside--to manually turn the eggs in the incubator (which we built from scratch) twice a day, which is "good enough" to hatch chicks without the physical deformities that occur if eggs are not rotated (in the wild, the brooding hen does that every half hour or so, slightly). But what killed my egg and ultimately chicken business (what comes first? The chicken or the egg? It's the egg. Without cheap eggs you cannot raise cheap chickens, since the cost of chicks--they are only about 75 cents or so, but it's a big factor when chickens are selling for about $2.50 or so a kilogram, and Cornish meat chickens take about 30 days to reach market size of 1 kg) is the fact that if an egg is unheated for between 30 minutes to an hour or more --it varies depending on the outside temperature and the Philippines are a tropical country--the egg will die. So with the frequent every other day power outages, which often last 30 minutes but sometimes more, all my 60 or so eggs died except two. So that was the end of my chicken raising experiment. It was fun while it lasted, and the neighborhood loved it, my prices were about equal to those of the supermarket but my profit margins were zero, and I learned a lot about chickens.

RL