New vs. old DACs - opinions?

Kijanki,
All transports do not sound exactly the same plugged into upsampling DACs. I know this because I have one of those DACs (MSB Platinum DAC III, ~$7k retail, upsamples everything 4x). I can plug my OPPO DVD player into it, and the sound quality goes down compared to my music server. And it goes down substantially enough that a laymen can hear the difference (as I have A and B'd this with friends).
I shudder anytime a DAC claims that it can be hooked up to any old transport and sound great (or the same). This is like claiming (to me) all cables sound the same. The do not.

Keith

This is an interesting question that seems a bit too general.

One thing I can say is that in the last 20 years, transports have gotten a lot better. This is one reason I have a difficult time comparing old DACs I have had to the newer ones. I know my transport is tons better than older ones I have had. One does not know what their DAC can do until they hook it up to a killer transport. And 20 years ago, those were way WAY expensive. The cost of great transports has fallen a lot.

I always recommend getting a great transport first (I like a music server with an Empirical Audio Off Ramp Turbo device) using the best ripping and playback software). You hook this up to almost any DAC and you are going to have a great idea how that DAC performs. So many transports back in the day (10 - 20 years ago) were awful... And this did not contribute to the sound of older DACs in the least.

Keith

I say my MSB Plat DAC upsamples 4x because it upsamples everything to either 176khz ($ * 44.1) or 192khz (4 * 48.1). If you include the 24 bit upsampling, I would guess that is where the other multiple comes in.

You are right about it not re-clocking the data.

However, I do know there are lesser and greater re-clockers. And I doubt the Benchmark has the best re-clocker of data out there (Ultraclock?). My OffRamp Turbo2 coming out of the computer does re-clock the data using a Superclock4 (one step below Ultraclock).

Interestingly, I would guess the biggest differences people hear with transports that do not re-clock the data better than the Benchmark is probably in the differences in the different digital cables they use. I have heard big differences in digital cables... I cannot explain why these differences occur per se... I only can observe them. I am glad I do not have to deal with that anymore. Although people have touted the differences in USB cables, and I did recently move to a more expensive USB cable (Wireworld's Ultraviolet 5), and I did get some sonic improvements.

I still think that re-clocking is not the magic bullet that can make all transports sound the same. Error correction is important as well. And that is where most transports fail when compared to a music server. Exact Audio Copy has amazing error correction in it, and this just cannot be duplicated on the fly with a traditional CD transport.

Keith

Interestingly, I just replaced the MSB Plat dac/dig preamp with a EMM Labs DCC-2 DAC/dig preamp. Just got it yesterday. It is quite a piece.

Keith