The SkeletonDAC page has an excellent guide/tutorial on building a SkeletonDAC, which I followed pretty closely.
The method for soldering the SSOP-28 chip was to anchor the chip by soldering down its first and last pins, and then lathering solder over all the pins until it was stuck to the board. This solders the chip to the board, but also solder bridges all the pins, so the solder bridges were removed with copious amounts of solder wick. Be aware that solder wick is sort of abrasive and will easily remove solder mask.
The results were pretty good considering I was doing this with a $5 iron and thick solder, and soldering the chip took about an hour. I checked over the soldering with a loupe and found all bridges.
Having some sort of loupe is immensely helpful in checking that all the pins are correctly soldered without destroying my eyesight. I used a 50mm f/1.8 lens I had lying around, which works pretty well for an improvised loupe.
Soldering the 805 and 1206 resistors and caps was a piece of cake, and in my opinion, easier and faster than soldering through-hole parts since gravity isn't fighting you. If you're right handed, you first put a blob of solder on the right pad for every part. Then, you grab the part with tweezers with your left hand, and insert it into the blob while your right hand holds the soldering iron and melts the blob of solder, which anchors the part. You then solder the other side of the part. Soldering 20 or so SMD caps and resistors only took 40 minutes, with much of that time spent simply taking the resistors out of the packaging.
After that, it's straightforward soldering of through-hole parts.
Unfortunately, I was a massive idiot and soldered the chip in backwards, which I only realized after soldering everything else in. Attempts to desolder the PCM2704 ripped the pins off the chip, and at that point, I might as well start from scratch and order a new PCB. In the end, I wasted 3 hours and $15 worth of parts because of one extremely stupid mistake. Oh well.
My other acts of idiocy this week included leaving a banana in my backpack, which then proceeded to commit seppuku and spill its insides all over my bag. Banana is actually a terrible substance when not eaten - it's sticky, hard to remove (especially when dried up), and gets everywhere. My notes are now covered in banana, and one of my laptop's USB ports no longer works since the contacts appear to be covered in dry banana. Derp.
