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Reimagining the 'Tangara' music player

Tangara is a pretty awesome project - no doubts about it. I found this review of Tangara's design pretty interesting and educational.

It has inspired us to build a similar FOSS DAP product but at a much lower cost of 40 USD (that being the launch price of Sansa Clip in year 2007). The idea is to deliver '90% of the value' of Tangara in a slightly smaller (but fatter) and more cost-effective package.

Initial tech stack: RP2350-Zero, PCM5102A 32-bit 384kHz DAC, Burr-Brown OPA1662 (specified for 3.3v) as the unity gain buffer and headphone driver, no explicit DC-DC converters anywhere, microSD card, everything will be a module if possible

Keywords: Mindful, Repairable, Sustainable, Minimal, Hand solderable, Retro-Modern, Hackability

Here is a very early WIP PoC schematic:

Very early WIP PoC schematic

We are likely to optimize the default performance for IEMs like Aria 2 (~33Ω). Driving large high-impedance headphones with a portable setup like this is NOT a priority.

Power source: We would like to use 14500 Li-ion AA battery ideally. Cheap, readily available and easy to self-replace. The standard AA size won us over!

Initial impressions with Alone With You - deadmau5 test track:

  • CJMCU-4344 DAC module + TS922 -> Fidelio X2. The 'rumbling bass' on this track seems to be much attenuated as compared to FiiO X3-II. Update: This was a bug in the selection of the output DC blocking capacitors values! 10uF with a ~32 ohms load forms a HPF with a cutoff of almost 500 Hz (heh)! Switching the DC blocking caps to >= 680uF fixes the low-bass problem!

While the CJMCU-4344 DAC module work pretty well, the underlying CS4344 chip has been discontinued by Cirrus Logic. We now use TI PCM5102A DAC module and it works even better it seems. TI TAD5242 (DAC with headphone driver) sounds amazing too but its QFN package can be problematic! For now TI PCM5102A serves us well and seems to "beat" WM8523 on paper.

Here is the new schematic for the mShuffle DAP:

Very early WIP PoC schematic

Have you noticed how much time is wasted these days on content browsing as opposed to the time spent on actual content consumption? So there will be no browse functionality in our player. Please do content curation on your computer and not on the DAP (this applies elsewhere too). This means that we can eliminate the display (screen) from our design! Since this is an audiophool grade device, there will be no wireless support either! Also, Bluetooth is quite problematic in apartment buildings with too many WiFi access points! The Bluetooth audio stream dropouts are a mood killer... enough said.

How do we strike the balance between "ultimate audiophool" quality, practicality and affordability? - How many of us have all of our favorite music in DSD 512 format? Also, how many of us can distinguish between DSD 512 and Opus 256 in a double-blind test? Is the answer none to these questions? ;)

Update: Special thanks to Hales for reviewing the mShuffle design in depth! Here is the updated schematic:

Very early WIP PoC schematic

Here is how an early PCB render is looking:

Very early WIP PoC render

Our WIP design files are available on GitHub.

References: