Lumin U1 Mini or Lumin T2 with Boulder 866

Boulder’s Sales Manager, Steve Huntley, says that the DAC section inside the 866 is largely derived from Boulder’s flagship 2120 DAC which uses a fairly uncommon delta/sigma DAC that requires a lot of external circuitry support and is not one of the usual ‘plug and play’ DAC chips that most companies use. Boulder also uses an external digital filter of its own design, rather than one of the ‘off-the-shelf’ filters built into the DAC. "We use this DAC chip because we wanted to create a truly optimised DAC section and are not afraid of the complexity required to implement it ourselves," he said.

My bet is you are wasting coin getting a second DAC but all you can do is try it. If you believe you can hear what no one else has.

That helps. I would rather then go for a transport only, like U1 or U1 Mini. I guess I'll have to use the USB connection in the digital section then, which also comes with its own set of expenses to reduce noise. But I am in the best place if I am using the best DAC available to me.

I have had a Lumin D2, A1, X-1 and the U-1 mini.  I love Lumin.  I was just using the U-1m ini as a transport while I was awaiting my music server.  I now have the music server so no longer need the U-1 mini which was only used for 4 months.  Send me a private email if you want more information on the U-1 mini

My bet is you are wasting coin getting a second DAC, but all you can do is try it. If you believe you can hear what no one else has.

This conversation has got a little interesting. On the Roon community forum, I sent a message to Peter Lie, the Firmware Lead @ Lumin Network Players. I asked him which one he would recommend I buy, T2 or U1, to go with Boulder 866, and this is what he had to say:

"Definitely the T2. There are various things that concern me with the Boulder integrated DAC, such as forced PCM upsampling in the built-in Pi. According to some reviews, DSD is also converted to PCM before playback. I don’t like these. Another minor thing is that it does not play DSD256 (although you can use Roon to downsample the DSD256 first)."

I have asked questions on these lines to Boulder about their DAC but have no response yet.