Digital Front End: Critical Listening

I dunno, I've just beeen through a raft of digital upgrades in the last 8 months. I started with old Arcam Alpha / Assemblage 2.6 / D2D-1 lashup, bought a SimAudio Nova, then switched to Audio Note gear - ending up with an insanely expensive CDT-2 / 4.1x Balanced Signature combo. There is no way on God's green earth that I'd have followed that kind of bank-account-draining path if I hadn't heard a difference at each step of the way that was worth the cost - to me.

A lot depends on the rest of the system and (even more important, IMO) your values, preferences and goals for reproduction. I can understand that the perceived differences, both objective and subjective, may not be significant enough to justify the expenditure.

I have to say that the biggest jump in quality I heard was going from the Nova to the Audio Note transport with a 3.1x Balanced DAC. The change wasn't so much in the objective audiophile performance parameters, as in the amount of sheer music that seemed to be released. But keep in mind that this change involved moving to a totally different design philosophy and technical implementation, as well as a 3x jump in price.

Sjh32, the advantage of a USB connection is that it's bi-directional, meaning that it can feed back signals from the sink (DAC) to the source (computer) to implement perfect error recovery. In practice this means a very low-cost technique for doing error-free, zero-jitter data transmission. There is at least one DAC on the market, from Wavelength Audio, that uses a USB link from a computer - it has no SPDIF interface at all. You can use a laptop as the data storage and the transport, which has the added advantage the advantage of a nice screen/mouse interface for selecting your playlist. For a bit more info take a look at Wavelength's Cosecant page