Fixing a recalcitrant DAC

surfatwork

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Just wanted to share a little victory.
My Soekris R2R had developed a disappointing habit of losing signal lock with the incoming Spdif stream, leading to it falling silent. It'd happen intermittently, with differing frequency. Sometimes it'd play multiple songs without a problem, sometimes it'd happen every few seconds. Each episode of silence lasted a few seconds, which got resolved on its own. Very annoying and made the dac pretty much unusable.

The first thought was an errant connector not making proper contact, so I rechecked everyone, multiple times. Spotted some dodgy looking pins, and fixed them. No luck. Checked the power supply. Checked if anything was warming up unreasonably. Replaced the input toslink receiver. It continued it's deviant habits.

Anyway, all of this investigation made me realize that the problem was on the DAC board itself. So took it to a mobile phone repair shop and got him to reflow the PLL clock section of the board with some hot air. And hey presto, it got resolved! She's singing just fine now - no hiccups.

Sharing just in case someone has intermittent problems with their components. Though I wouldn't advocate sticking your entire AV into the oven, if you can isolate it to a specific board or section of the board, this technique might be worth a shot. Cheers.
 
Just wanted to share a little victory.
My Soekris R2R had developed a disappointing habit of losing signal lock with the incoming Spdif stream, leading to it falling silent. It'd happen intermittently, with differing frequency. Sometimes it'd play multiple songs without a problem, sometimes it'd happen every few seconds. Each episode of silence lasted a few seconds, which got resolved on its own. Very annoying and made the dac pretty much unusable.

The first thought was an errant connector not making proper contact, so I rechecked everyone, multiple times. Spotted some dodgy looking pins, and fixed them. No luck. Checked the power supply. Checked if anything was warming up unreasonably. Replaced the input toslink receiver. It continued it's deviant habits.

Anyway, all of this investigation made me realize that the problem was on the DAC board itself. So took it to a mobile phone repair shop and got him to reflow the PLL clock section of the board with some hot air. And hey presto, it got resolved! She's singing just fine now - no hiccups.

Sharing just in case someone has intermittent problems with their components. Though I wouldn't advocate sticking your entire AV into the oven, if you can isolate it to a specific board or section of the board, this technique might be worth a shot. Cheers.
I might try this with my iFi DAC. Left channel drops out randomly. Had ran the soldering iron on the analog connectors but it didn't work.
 
Anyway, all of this investigation made me realize that the problem was on the DAC board itself. So took it to a mobile phone repair shop and got him to reflow the PLL clock section of the board with some hot air.

Just curious ... what exactly did he do here?


.
 
Just curious ... what exactly did he do here?


.
This is what I got him to do.
Put some flux on some of the solder joints, especially the IC and capacitor ones. Set the hot air to about 250C initially and blow hot air on the board component side. Clean it up with 530 contact/flux cleaner. Then add some more flux, set it to 350C, and blow air on the underside, heating the joints from beneath. Clean everything with the 530 cleaner again
 
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