Help choosing a dac

under $1500 try a Benchmark DAC1 or Exemplar Little DAC

Monarchy NM24 is very highly regarded as well.

I recently went through this decision myself, and chose the Musical Fidelity. I have been very happy with my decision. By all means, listen to a few and chose whichever works best for you. Just wanted you to know there are other satisfied users of the MF X-DACv8 out there

What about buying a CDP. How about an Esoteric Audio. I think they are the best CDPs made. Your system is fantastic and it deserves a fantastic CDP.

Haven't heard one personally but Lavry DA10 (SS) and Paradisea (tube) seem to get quiet a bit of positive feedback.

i went from an arc cd3mk2 to esoteric dv50 to modded sb3 with paradisea dac. after a few tweaks and cable choices, the paradisea is an awesome dac for its price. some may not like it, as it is non-oversampling. very natural sounding and very lush. i am quite happy with it and find no need to upgrade. i enjoy music a lot more now, although the arc cd3 was a fantastic player. i've heard good things about ayre cx5 also. i would get a high end player to minimize having to look for a good transport.

If I were you I would be looking at either the Benchmark DAC or Musical Fidelity TriVista DAC.

Larvy10
Benchmark DAC1 (which I have & use with my Toshiba player)
Stello DA100
Zhaolu with zapfilter mod. (Best bang for the buck out of the list)
Monarchy NM24
Stello DA220
MF A324
Belcanto DAC 3

I had a Modded & maxxed out XDAC3, same as the V8 minus the UBS connection, A switch to select solid state or tube..

The Benchmark is a improvement over the XDAC3. The bass is much tighter. More detail, & the clarity is top notch..But the XDAC3 was more 'fun' to listen to.

What about the Bel Canto DACs?

I'd say give the MOTU 828mkII a try. Its geared towards a pro world, but thats probably a good thing as they seem to use snake oil as engine oil (drives them to the shop to buy their justifiably expensive gear!)

Yea yea, I mean in the end it uses the same TI chip most dac's use, but its a solid system with a good deal of interconnectivity and allows for a variety of word clock sync options. Technically its a 128X oversampled device and offers a decent SNR via its usage of high bit DAC process. I'd definitely give it a look over and check out its technical specs. I think you'll be very impressed when you see it's price compared with the prices of the other devices you see.

My 2cents as a professional EE in the field of control and DSP is that you're better off with a stand alone word clock if you are really that worried about jitter, and you can't ever get rid off the jitter introduced by making the CD. I say external word clock because it will offer you a variety of options many DAC's wont, like the stable clock and straightforward sync. with your video devices as well as the other audio devices as necessary.

Anyways, this is the set up I am running right now and am pretty happy with it to be honest with you. Its a huge upgrade from the old rubbish gear I had.

I'd say Tube is pretty cool as the tubes themselves will be linear into the ghz range, its just that the output transformers necessary will be tricky. If you are looking at a low power output then i'd say this is a reasonable thing to do as well, But its not like you're gaining with this as you will be mucking with your phase response excessively and you won't be getting around the true problem with DA conversion.

I guess to beat the horse to death, with 128x sampling you can get a low pass filter to look awfully like a lossless communication system

I guess I didn't give due process to that tube dac, speaking much too quickly about the output transformer (assuming it amplified DAC output) But that isn't the case. Strangely it does employ a rather inferior DAC chip that is the Philips 1545 (inferior as compared to what is achievable and offered by most vendors of such things) but which is nevertheless popular.

I think the reason it is used and not something more sophisticated is that its somewhat easy to implement such a device using such a chip, you don't really need to go into heavy PCB design, or worry about ground planes etc.... I suppose if I find something distressing while I read up on the specs/datasheets I'll be my normal (annoying) self and relay them!

Not sure which tube DAC you are referring to here, the Musical Fidelity X-DACv8 has an optional (button to switch on and off) tube output buffer, but uses a BurrBrown DAC. Specifically it uses:

Burr-Brown SRC4392 Sample Rate Converter
Burr-Brown DSD1792 24bit/192kHz DAC
Burr-Brown PCM2706 for USB
2 Phillips 6922 Triodes for tube buffer before final SS output stage (can be bypassed)

I was looking at some of the details on this Paradisea DAC mostly because it was flagged as tube. I'm in general anti-tube as few people do a commendable job doing the output transformers.

well sample rate conversion is really simple to do when dealing w/ whole number rates and is perfect in every regard and lossless when inserting blank space - upsampling. Kind of a silly thing to make a chip for these days, though, in this application.

But again, a 24Bit, 8X Dac is pretty sad in today's terms where we are looking at 24Bit 128X Dac's. Not sure what to say other than Burr Brown is a dead-has-been-leading-tech company, and these specs just don't match up to what is out now. I surely wouldn't pay a premium for such a dac when the day is done as so much emphasis is done on these snake oil DSP chips when all you are dealing with at the end of the day are normal DSP chips (for 2007 granted not 2000).

I must admit, I am not very impressed with the implementation of this dac from musical fidelity.

benchmark dac 1 every day of the week....incredible performance and almost for free

What improvement, if any, could I expect if I added a Benchmark or similar DAC to my Rega Appollo CDP?

well it's a dac...no miracles is to be expected...the THD is something like 0.0001 at a good dac and a speaker <1% so...

I just read about this product in a speaker review. Cambridge Audio makes a CD player/DAC. It's the Azur 840C.

It Upsamples the CD data into 24-bit/384kHz. It also has two digital inputs to upsample another source. I assume it can upsample outside sources at the same rate. Two DACS for each channel. Other features as well.

I just read about it today and have no clue what it costs.

CA Azur 840C lists for about $1400. Yes, it does upsample signals fed to either of its two digital inputs to 24/384. It's getting stellar reviews everywhere, for what that's worth. The 740C offers the same upsampling of CDs and digital input signals, but uses dual Wolfson DACs instead of the dual Analog Devices DACs in the 840C. The 740C lacks the balanced outputs of the 840C, and retails for $1K. The 740C has also garnered some great reviews in the audio press.

You're smoking crack, my friend. Hundreds of dollars does not equate to "for free" in my book...

- Steve O.

My impressions of the Channel Islands Audio VDA2 DAC here.

well compared to other dac's with a pricetag of a couple of thousand dollars it's a bargain

Has anyone out there heard or heard anything about the Cayin
iDac usb?

None.

& you compared the two correct?

Try the 30 day at home trial of the PS Audio DAC III I did and kept mine. I listen to it everyday and can't get enough.

taam

Instead of a DAC, why not buy a CD player? That way, you get a better transport as well.

No, the salient word was expect. In my opinion one would not expect two DAC's to sound different from one another. They may but it would be a surprise if they did. He asked what difference in sound he could expect. I said none because he shouldn't expect a difference.