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Anyone using an Apogee Mini-Dac?

Recently, I ripped several hundred CD's uncompressed to the hard drive of my Mac G4 1.25 GHz Powerbook and played it through my system by taking the headphone OUT and splitting it into the R & L inputs in my pre-amp. Sounded suprisingly good. Better than CD's played on my $400 Denon DVD player. And that was from a Headphone out! Now, I have bought an M-Audio USB Audiophile DAC. This allows me to use the computer as a digital transport which feeds a digital signal to the DAC through the computer's USB port. This makes an incredible imrpovement to what was already pretty darn good sound. The M-Audio DAC cost around $175. Now, I'm curious. Apogee makes a similar USB DAC called the Mini-Dac, which goes for around $1,000. Anyone had any experience with these?
rsbeck
naschbac
12 posts
 
I've not used the Mini-DAC, but my recomendation at that price level from my experience in music production would be to grab the Mobile I/O ULN-2 from Metric Halo.

You'll have no need for the +DSP feature, and while MSRP on the base ULN-2 is $1,195 you can find it from any number of online pro-audio retailers for less.

I've used their 2882+DSP interface as an input interface to my DAW, and I've been EXTREMELY impressed with the quality of the DAC, the mic pre's could be a little better, but they improved them in the ULN-2.

-Nathan
audioodyssey
18 posts
 
Anyone considering the Apogee Mini DAC (or already has one) needs to hear it running on batteries!

I am running mine on (8) "C" cells at the moment and it sounds dramatically better this way! Once I see how long the run-time is, I will decide if I need to go to some larger batteries.
duketogo
2 posts
 
RE: Batteries for Mini-DAC

I have no idea how you're doing the 8 C cell trick, but some other battery options would be:

OEM Site down just now
http://www.powgle2.com
but this site seems to carry batteries that look identical
http://www.batterygeek.net

These look heavy, but top notch?
http://www.ecocharge.com

Cheers
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