ADAT DAC

I've been playing around with the idea of using my adat ouputs to drive the SB2 summing mixer.
How hard would it be to build a DAC to do this?
It seems like the combination of the coolaudio V1402 adat chip and AKM AK4458 8 channel dac would do the job.
What do you think? Is this worth doing? Or should I just buy a used alesis ai3 and plug that into the sb2?

Sounds like alot of work for little gain ,theres quite a few boxes that do adat optical to analog out ,behringer ada 8000 is one I use although its for the inputs I use it ,I also stripped out the Behringer pre's ,so I have line level direct to the adat chip . Adat convertor units can be found cheaply these days secondhand so might be more worthwhile to concentrate your project work on something else .

Today, that would be the ADA8200. Less than 200$. And there was an even cheaper clone from Phonic: 150 €. That seems to be gone now, except from the South American market?

@Tubetec: are the inputs on the digital board true line level?

I know these are balanced and I'm considering modding one of my ADA8000's too, as I seem to need preamps less and less these days. And one of them needs to be repaired anyway.

Hi Cy,
the psu on the ada8000 runs a little hot ,and tends to cook itself . I dont need or want the pres in the way ,so I removed the entire input board from the unit ,I fitted new jacks and xlr's to the front panel and I wired these directly to the wavefront chips ,balanced input of +17dbu is required for 0 db fs digital. Another benefit apart from improved tone and noise levels is that the psu runs much cooler now .Heres the schematic:
http://www.gyraf.dk/schematics/Behringer_ada8000_analouge.PDF
I removed the two 22uf caps next to the A/D chip from the board ,added a twin core screened cable which I ran to the new jacks and xlrs with dc blocking caps mounted on the back of the xlr sockets. I did have to reconnect the master and locked leds to the main board too . The original line inputs on the ada 8000 are just attenuated and fed through the mic amps . Anyway it all works great with external pres now ,but I do tend to keep the patch leads as short as possible ,performance if fed from an unbalanced source  is compromised though ,but as Ive got both pre and post eq  balanced sends on my mixer its ok .

Of course if you want to be able to drive your pres a bit harder than +17 you could always add say 6db of attenuation on the inputs.

I've modded mine for the heat problem. Just put a 120 Ohm 15W resistor in series with the primary winding 

Thanks for the info. I might also rip it's guts out now. +17 dB should be good for what I intend to do.

Get one of the wavefront chips and drop in 4x PCM5102A's.
They are nice and easy to drive - single 3.3V rail, auto config for clocks etc.

Heck. Even I could design that.