Arylic Up2stream Mini with DAC boards and using ACPWorkbench for sound tuning (2025)

Hi,

my first post here. I am highly impressed how much audio competence is available here. I would like to hear your thoughts and experiences for the following.

I recently startetd upcycling beautiful 70's hifi components making them suitable for today's daily use. The main idea is to build beautiful 1 box solutions combining vintage hifi gear with modern, digital technology.

One example: I internally upgraded an AKAI-AA-1020 receiver with an Arylic Up2stream Mini Streamer + an Arylic DAC board (ESS 9023 Sabre chip). + a Mean Well PS-05-5 power supply. Everything is wired internally. The stereo signal is wired to the AUX input of the AKAI (some pictures below).

I am thrilled with the sound I get out of the AKAI with the Arylic Streamer using two old Phonar Laser 200 speakers. The improvement of the sound by the additional DAC board - to my ears - is small. The highlight and crucial for me is the integrated DSP. I took measurements with Room EQ Wizard and a UMIK-1 microphone and then made a few EQ corrections in the ACPWorkbench softare from Arylic. This brought a great improvement in sound quality. I could tame exaggerated highs (from the speakers) and some exaggerated bass frequency areas which were rather room and positioning problems.

I am currently testing the Arylic Up2stream amp for another project where I want to upcylce an old Technics Hifi tuner into a complete Hifi system (I have done similar upgrades with a Kenwood KX-400 tape deck and a Fisher FM-7700 tuner). My experince with the amp is similar. I am testing it with new Fyne F301 speakers. Out of the box, the sound quality is ok. After measuring with REW and then equalizing in ACPWorkbench, the sound is on another level. Really beautiful.

I am curious, if you have similar or other experiences?

Have a nices sunday
Bidjan

P.S.: I am living in Hamburg, Germany, Feel free to contact me when such upcycling projects are interesting and when you would like to take a closer look and listen.

Welcome to ASR Bidjan. Fun project making these older boxes live again for modern needs. I've reused old equipment just for the enclosure before stuffing various components into them but not adding additional features to an existing unit. Nice to have it all contained so the streamer isn't in a separate box.

Any way to add the DSP to the tape loop so that phono/line in/tuner can benefit from the EQ as well?

For those of you interested in details of the components used in this project:
Streamer: Arylic Up2stream Mini
Arylic DAC Board
Mean Well PS-05-5 power supply