Thanks, everybody, for the responses so far. Yes, I have of course considered buying the Bryston DAC, and though the BDA 3 does occasionally appear on the used market, it was my interest in R2R DACs that prompted my question. I'll be very interested to hear whether the adapter from Ebay actually works. I'll stay tuned.
Need some information about DSD over HDMI
I'm not sure whether this is a really dumb or really complicated question, but I'm hoping there's an answer. I have a Cambridge Audio CXU universal player which I really like, but which doesn't support I2S. Instead, it outputs DSD directly over HDMI, but very few DACS accept this protocol. In fact, the only one I know of is Bryston's highly respected BDA3. My current DAC is an AMR DP-777 which I also really like but it's old enough that neither of these protocols are supported. My SACDs end up being internally converted to PCM by the CXU player, and output over analog connections, so the external DAC is bypassed entirely. Okay, pretty standard stuff so far, I think. However, I have lately been very tempted to try out one of the newer R2R ladder DACs from Audio-gd or Denafrips, which DO support I2S. So my question is: does any kind of adapter exist that can convert the DSD data on my SACDs to I2S format so that one of the aforementioned DACs can accept it? Thanks for helping me out with this.