SAVIO AK-08 teardown


SAVIO AK-08 is cheap USB soundcard. I have bough mine from Czech shop Mironet. The cost was about 84 CZK (or 3.41 EUR).

Bottom picture

Side picture

At first glance the obvious adventage of the soundcard is dual input and output. However, both inputs and outputs are connected together. So the soundcard actually haves signle stereo output and single mono microphone input. This can probably still be utilized if pair of people are listening to the same audio. But the double microphone input still feels somewhat dubious.

Although I am no expert in judging of audio quality, it seems to be decent. There are no immediately obvious audio artifacts.

Teardown

The device is composed out of two main pieces of plastic chasi, that are held together by seven small pins with no glue added. There are also two small plastic pieces that act as buttons. The buttons should decrease or increase volume and mute speaker or microphone.

Covers

The PCB sadly contains black blob, so it is not possible to tell what chip is actually used. The USB device is identified as 08BB:2902. This should stand for PCM2902, that has stereo ADC and only three HID inputs. Unlike this chip which has mono ADC and four HID inputs (buttons). So I do not think the USB identification is correct.

PCB top

PCB bottom

The PCB contains very poor soldering job. The pads are not properly soaked and there is leftover flux residue. The USB connector is also missing solder on its holder pins.

Interesting thing is also that the decoupling capacitors for audio output with classical Cx marking were replaced with 33 Ohm resistors. There are also empty parallel to them, presumably for through-hole capacitors.

Otherwise the PCB contains three capacitors attached between ground and chip. There is also decoupling capacitor for the microphone and two 2 kOhm resistors with capacitor probably for the microphone bias voltage.

The last noticable thing are two additional pads marked as MIC and MUS, but I am not certain about theirs purpose.