Tubes or not

Audio Mirror Tubadour, Border Patrol Dac SEI, MHDT Orchid. These three dacs seem to be the go to tubed dacs in your price range. The Border Patrol only uses the tube in the power supply, the others in the out put stage. Preowned Lampizator Amber would also check a few boxes for you. Solid state, the field opens up but it would be hard for you to go wrong with one of the Schiit multibit dacs. Depending on the model, the Schiit could leave you with some extra cash to apply toward other parts of your system. Best wishes.

Elizabeth, the OP listed that he/she already had tubes upstream. I always enjoy your posts but usually you don’t make blanket statements like “all mid priced dacs” and then opining that they are “all flavor of the month”. In retrospect, you probably didn’t intend it to come off that you had heard these and other dacs in your system and summarily dismissed them. There is so much great equipment being built today and the advances in the digital arena requires open minds and actual listening.

Given your stated budget and your requirement for DSD, the Audio Mirror would be a fine place to start in the tubed dac world. Even though I am not personally a fan of Chord or the Chord Qutest, many people are and it does DSD.

As an aside, I prefer everything that's been mentioned above to your existing dac. No intention whatsoever to offend anyone but the Wadia you have was a long way qualitatively from the old Wadia or the sound being achieved these days by many manufacturers. You should experience considerable improvements from this upgrade. It is unlikely though that you will get the quantity of inputs you mention above. Most dacs dont offer 2 toslinks, et al. Thats the specialty of A/V amps.

@georgehifi 


The latter badged Wadias are nothing like their predecessors. Not even close. The OP can almost throw a dart at a board with 10 popular current dacs on it and improve materially.