Best Sonos ZP-80 Mod?

Hi Guys - I have two of the ZP-80 units from Cullen. I went through Underwood HiFi (Wally) and they are great! One unit was set to a 48k output (my Spectral DAC will only take a 48k) and another unit set to a 96k outputfor my Peachtree Decco. The Decco is a great piece gear itself.

These are the mods:
The upgrade consists of installing a new custom Cullen Circuits designed pc board that contains:
1) A high end sample rate converter made by TI
2) A low jitter clock with less than .5ps jitter
3) A low noise power supply for the clock
4) A new micro processor
5) Input & output digital buffers.
6) New upgraded RCA output jacks are added.

I have not tried the analog outputs but direct head to head w/an unmodified ZP-80 gives you a much bigger less compressed sounding soundstage. Bass is much better and fuller and there is more "air" around all the instruments/vocals. It's well worth the cash.

The current ZP-80 mod by Cullen Circuits will not improve performance from the analog outputs. The re-clocking benefits the digital outputs to your DAC.

janikan, does the Cullen mod still allow the ZP to update its software? Hopefully, the ZP will behave just like standard in terms of its sw upgradability.

Shazam - I understand what you are trying to do. There is just no solution out there for this. Also, there are no USB converter or DAC solutions that are completely jitter insensitive IME.

What you could do is use the S/PDIF or AES input on the USB DAC driven from a reclocker like the Pace-Car sourced from the Sonos. This will match or beat the quality that you get with straight USB. This would be driven by Superclock4 rather than an inexpensive oscillator.

Steve N.

What we need is a shoot-out between the Empiracle and Cullen mods...

They both know what they are doing, though one is double the price of the other ($550.00 vs 1100.00+).

But which one sounds better, and why?