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Small form factor, budget DACs?

I'm trying to restore the musicality to my system, piece by piece. A few years ago my Jolida JD-602A CD player finally died and I've never really found a good replacement. I think really I've been mourning the loss and lacked the funds to get something of equal quality (since it was sort of a giant killer).

So, what can I get for < $400? Used is fine, but it has to be a compact form factor - I don't have room for another full-sized component. I think the 1/2 size form factor that Channel Islands, Musical Fidelity and Creek use is about as big as I could go.

24/96 is a plus since I have a bit of DVD-A stuff but not a necessity. I don't really have an opinion for or against oversampling, or regarding filterless DACs.

Here are the DACs that have popped up in my search so far:

$175 - Lite Audio filterless DAC
$250-400 - Ack! Dac
$200? - Creek OBH-14 - I'd have gotten one by now but I have yet to see one pop up on the used market. Probably a good sign.
$300-400? - Musical Fidelity X-24K - older DAC (circa 2000), but it looks nice and let's me stay with the appealing X-component form factor (I have an X-ACT and X-LPS now). Maybe a little overpriced - I can't help but think that for that money I could get something better
$400-600 - Channel Islands DAC - undoubtedly the best DAC on the list, but also the most expensive, so it would take the longest for me to save up the coinage.

Anything I'm missing from the list?
hudsonhawk

Showing 1 response by islandflyfisher

islandflyfisher
94 posts
 
I’ve got to chime in here. I’ve owned an Audio Mirror for a number of months and have experienced what everyone is talking about regarding NOS DAC’s. I couldn’t be happier with mine.

One of my biggest frustrations is this crazy hobby is a bad sounding CD. I’ve got tons of them that until recently, only listening to them in the office or car.

I just made a huge switch changing over from a Marantz SA14 SACD player which was mostly used as a redbook transport with the Audio Mirror to a digital music server which is PC based.

I ripped all my CD’s to AIFF files in iTunes and used a product by Roku to bridge the signal from my PC to the Audio Mirror DAC.

End result is improved sound on all CD’s but a major improvement on poor engineered CD’s. Yeap, I can listen to them all now. I think it’s all about error correction. A CD transport can only do so much. Near perfect CD error correction for today PC is a simple process for them.
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