dac for squeezebox touch

I'm using a Wyred4Sound DAC-1 with my SB Duet. Previously had the DacMagic. The DAC-1($995) was a Major step up.

I'm leaning towards a Eastern Electric Minimax. I'm concerned about buying something without a tube option on the output stage. And the EE has great reviews and word of mouth.

I tried the currently popular Bryston DAC (borrowed from a friend). Via SPDIF it was a serious step up from the Touch in terms of detail, nuance and staging. It did sound great. However the Touch is damn nice in terms of sounding natural - nice timbre - which makes it non-trivial to beat in a meaninful way. The Bryston was clearly more of a high end sound. BTW the Bryston requires some kind of reclocking device for the USB input, per my experience with it.

As for the Eastern Electric, we shall see :-)

Art

I'm rocking the Touch with an EE Minimax DAC and am quite content with the pairing. My suggestion would be be dropping the $750 on the DAC and the remaining budget on digital modifications from Bolder Cable for the Touch.

The DAC and mods (along with a Siemens Silverplate and Wywire cables) have my digital coming much closer than it should to my 10x more expensive analog rig.

gopher, have you directly compared the touch's analog outs with that of the minimax?

Rayray8, I have compared them. The analog outs of the Touch are entirely respectable, but in my system, the EE DAC fed by the Touch coax is a marked improvement.

No, I have not. My Touch has fed digital to my Minimax from day one. I've never experimented with its analog outs.

Also, for some reason coax from my Touch to Minimax sounded inferior to toshlink until I had digital mods done on my Touch. I think I was in the minority with that finding.

That said, both stock and modified I had the best sounding using an RCA to XLR cable from the coax into AES/EBU.

I feed my squeezbox to a CAL Alpha Tube DAC via a glass toslink cable and it's definitely a step up.

QN

SB Touch analog output sound fine. My EE Minimax DAC is a definite step up in resolution and refinement.

Musical Fidelity Trivista DAC.
2 digital inputs without XLR which suit your Logitech Touch well.