PENG is handing out wrong info here. I’ve chatted to Yamaha Technical who have confirmed the ESS Sabre Dac within the AS 801 looks after ALL of the digital section…
Dear Mr Thompson,
Thanks for your patience.
For your reference, your case number is 00396489.
With regards to your question, engineers and designers have let us know that on our A-S801, the digital signal path on the circuit diagram,
Optical/Coax and USB-DAC inputs both go to ESS Sabre DAC.
Hope this helps and if you have any further questions or queries, please do not hesitate to ask.
Many thanks
Yamaha Technical A/V
Please re-read the posts and you will know that I did not "handing out wrong info here" at all, though in my first response I did say it use the PCM DAC chip, based on what's in the service manual, but I did clarify it in subsequent posts that it was just
a possibility and provided supporting information of either scenarios.
See also post#35, a different poster also emailed Yamaha USA and was told that the Optical/Coax input did not use the ESS DAC chip, so are you going to say he handed out wrong info too? I wouldn't and did not, as he simply quoted two responses, one from Yamaha Canada and another Yamaha USA and got different responses. That showed, like me, he wasn't so sure about which is the correct one.
If you only read the 3 posts immediately before your own, you would have known people were just wondering, no one seemed 100% sure! Personally, I felt it is more likely the same ESS chip is used for all digital inputs and the block diagram below might have applied so some prototype, or there might have been different versions of the A-S801, that's of course just speculation, not verified facts.
The service manual happens to be in the public domain, so maybe you can do us a favor and ask your source ("engineers and designers.." that your Yamaha rep mentioned) and then hopefully (but I guess unlikely) they would update/clarify that part of the service manual if deemed necessary.
If you are interested in reading the whole manual, it is linked in post#34 through post#36, and let me emphasized again as I did in post#34:
That being said, I was quite aware of the
very likely scenario that the ES9010K2M might have been used for the Coax/Optical inputs as well. It is not 100% imo (may be 90
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
) because of the conflicting information on the service manual.
So personally, I think there is a higher probability that the following diagram in the service manual may not be accurate, or there are different versions of the A-S801, I am still not 100% sure. Can't believe after 5 years, we are still talking about this!!