Border Patrol SPDIF SE

About the Border Patrol SPDIF SE

The BorderPatrol DAC SE S/PDIF is a single-input Special Edition digital-to-analog converter from BorderPatrol Audio Electronics. It is a minimalist non-oversampling (NOS) R-2R design built around the Philips TDA1543 DAC chip, with no digital filtering and no active output buffer. The S/PDIF version accepts a coaxial S/PDIF digital input and provides a stereo pair of unbalanced RCA analog outputs. Its SE specification adds BorderPatrol’s twin-transformer power-supply arrangement, an ELNA Cerafine power-supply capacitor, and film-and-foil signal coupling capacitors. The power supply is a hybrid tube/solid-state, choke-input-filter design using an EZ80 rectifier along with high-speed, low-noise diodes and RC snubbing. Published material identifies the current equivalent as the SE-i S/PDIF model; the older DAC SE S/PDIF is no longer listed as a current standalone model.