DAC comparison

@soix 

I've been test driving cars. The Audi S5 and S6 are illustrative / representative of the same. Uber competent. Yet missing more than something [for me].  : )

Indeed. Audi makes a fine car (my wife drives Audi Allroads after years in BMW's) but they are FWD biased, even if power is being delivered to all four wheels. 

@erik_squires +1

I owned that dac. It was good, not great, at its release and it was far better upsampling than redbook. If you want it to match other ARC equipment then cool. If you do get it though, the USB input is horrible. Use spdif or AES. In today’s dac world, I would take a Border Patrol at around $1,000 used and never, ever regret NOT getting the DAC 8. For a very brief while though, ARC’s Ref dac was selling for between $4-5k. Now that was a great dac if you ignored all the poorly thought out tech. It was a terrific dac with a Ref5se output stage. Feed that dac through its AES input and it was a screaming deal at its used price.

Dacs have come so far the past 5-10 years. Alot of really bright people have addressed jitter in some truly innovative ways. Its a great time to be in the hobby.

@ghdprentice 

You have an amazing dac in the refcd9se. The Dac8 is nowhere close. In fact, if you heard them both in your system you might wonder what was going on at ARC at the time. It was a reasonable dac if fed a low jitter signal through spdif/aes but its usb implementation was ill conceived.