Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems CLUX-11SA HDMI to analogue converter

My unit arrived today.

Its case is easy to open, and the complete print slides out withouth issues.
Seems to have a HDMI receiver chip at the input and a HDMI transmitter chip at the output. Near the audio outputs are what it seems 4 D/A converters.

I cannot test it right now, as i have not the proper HDMI equipment right here.

I made a photo and can make more if needed: CLUX-11SA

I could be wrong, but I think these are more likely to be analogue output circuits. I would have thought that a single DAC chip handles the eight channels of D2A.

jaco, can you take some pictures of the whole circuit board on both sides?

Thanks,
Joel

Hi Jaco,

Thanks, are there any components on the back side?

Those little chips might be DAC chips. A search on that part number didn't find anything useful. They would need to be scoped to find the proper pins. If those are the DACs and they have a 2v output they might simply be running that to the outputs. Probably wouldn't have much drive ability and distortion would vary by load. Also doesn't look like there is much (if any) filtering post DAC.

The Oppo 980 uses some type of barely labeled mystery DAC for its rear channels and a Cirrus 6 channel DAC for the rest of the channels. In the Oppos case that DACs output does go through a real line stage.

Thanks,

Shawn

Here they are:

front
back

Hi Jaco,

Thanks for the rear picture of the unit.

The traces on the back of the board are telling. I'm about 99% sure those are DACs.

If you look carefully you will see that there are three traces with vias at basically the location of each mystery chip. Looks like they basically come up under the mystery chips based on the two vias a little to the left of the traces which can be seen on the top picture of the board.

Looking at the traces the same three signals are fed to those chips. It is a good bet those are master clock, bit clock and L/R clock. There are also 4 traces with each one going to one chip alone. That is likely the serial data lines for each pair of channels.

Thanks,

Shawn

I remember someone at M commenting on the care that they took in making sure that the HDMI pins signal runs on the PCB of the HDMAX 421 (121?) were identical - looking at the runs on this PCB, possibly they need not to have bothered ?

Or maybe all the symmetrical stuff is layered within the board?

jaco, a user on avforums told me the following:

And:

I will be very interested to find out if the source switching crackle is resolved with your V1.8C firmware. Please report!

Joel

Ok, just tested it.

It is hooked up behind output 2 of my Lumagen Radadiance which tells the input devices only to accept PCM 6 channel.
When i switch from inputs i hear no problems.

The output singal level seems bit low though, but some extra numbers in volume makes up for that i think.

It needs an actual output device behind it to work, so i hooked the output to a input of the Radiance.

Thanks jaco. I'm not surprised it can't act as an HDMI sink, but I too have a spare Radiance input...

No crackling on input changes is very good news. Are you able to test changing signals from the same source? e.g. A change from 48kHz to 96kHz?

I would not know what would have 48 Khz and 96 Khz signal, perhaps such a Dolby or DTS demo Bluray ?

Jaco, what spinners do you have? An 800v4 or G9x could be used to do this, as could an Oppo 980...

800v3, Samsung 1400, Toshiba XE-1, Popcornhour A-110