Closest DAC to Vinyl Sound?

Oxymoron, you know, two things that are mutually contradictory. Famous examples : jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, sex worker.

There are external DACs that sound sort of hi-fi, drawing attention to their wonderful sound, and there are others that stand aside and let the music play. I like the second kind and you can get them at different price points.

The cheapest I've found goes for 50 bucks on eBay, a Chinese-made unit branded Muse with four TDA1543 chips wired in parallel. Up the scale a bit might be the Valab TDA1543 DAC at $200, but I haven't heard it yet. Another one I like a lot, for more money, is the Apogee Mini-DAC. In fact any Apogee converter I've heard has sounded great to me.

One key to getting good sound with an external DAC is the length of the digital interconnect. In every system I've tested, a 1.5m cable sounded better than a shorter one.

My point was that the question Hayraz raised was not an oxymoron. Poor grammar, regardless of the venue is…well, still poor grammar.

Thanks anyway Tobias, I know you meant well...!

Once I got the Mhdt Havana hooked up to my Cary 308, I lost my preference for vinyl over cd sound. The vinyl rig is a Rega P25 , Soundsmith'ed Clearaudio Wood MM playing through a MAC C220. My vinyl is mostly Jazz, cds' are classical and other.

Depends what your definition is of analog sound. Most people I know think analog is bloom sounding sort of like the tube dacs in Kora Hermes and Musical Fidelity Tri-Vista. If you are saying that you want an easeful sound then that would be one way to look at it. Some of my favorite DACs are the Museatex Bitstream stock and modified form, the Lampinzator DAC and the one I had built for me which uses a stacking chip set and transformers. Adding the transformers really improved the sound by removing AC noise and keep a few caps out of the signal path. This produced fantastic tone and let the music just flow out. While all this worked for me, the most improvement I hears was using direct heated tubes in a custom built preamp. That has been the single biggest upgrade I have heard.

Happy Listening.

BigKidz,
Which DHT tube is in your preamp? And does it utilize coupling caps or an interstage transformer, just curious.