Has anyone try the Benchmark DAC1 Preamp?

I know somebody who added an old Krell PAM-1 to his Benchmark DAC1 and said that it made an improvement.

The integration of a preamp and DAC makes no sense to me. I would rather have the DAC integrated with the transport. Reasons:

- analog signals do not benefit as much from short signal paths anywhere near as much as digital signals
- every interface you add in a digital system increases jitter
- putting a preamp in a DAC means that even more of your analog signal is exposed to high freq digital noise
- digital preamps are mostly lousy and should be avoided
- analog preamps are better anyway, and you are better off having a seperate analog preamp than to have it built into the DAC for so many reasons. If you are going to have an analog volume control - why have it built into the DAC?

I can't think of any good reasons to have a preamp built into the DAC. If you want a DAC, get a DAC ... but don't think that a built-in preamp in a DAC will be superior to a standalone pre. In almost all cases the standalone pre will be superior.

Cldinsmore I don't know what type of preamp the Benchmark DAC1 PRE is because the literature in their website does not say. Consequently I did not say if the DAC1 PRE was digital or analogue. If you say it is analogue, then you must be better informed than me.

As for "adding an additional interface", what I mean is the connection between transport and DAC. In a one box CD player the connection between transport and DAC is short, and the impedance is matched. With ANY outboard DAC, you have: output jack, cable, input jack. The length and impedance of the cable is not known by the designer, and each cable/jack interface is a major source of jitter.

"Immune to jitter from the data lock system" ... either someone has been reading too much marketing material or Benchmark is able to offer something that even Meitner can not do :)

I would also disagree with your contention that 0's and 1's are less prone to contamination than analog signal. Remember that a 16 bit PCM digital transmission is a square wave transmitted at 1 MHz (by Fourier analysis even higher than this - thanks to H3, H5, H7, and so on). Digital signal is exquisitely sensitive to impedance mismatch. Analogue signal is "only" 20Hz-22kHz. Which do you think would be more prone to degradation?

Sure Cldinsmore - here is a good link. http://www.jitter.de/english/engc_navfr.html