What's the greatest bargain in DAC's these days?


Hi, Gang,
I am currently running my Music Hall CD 25.2 CD player as a transport through my Musical Fidelity M1 DAC. I also have the Musical Fidelity V-Link 192 for playing hi-res files from the USB port on my laptop.
DAC's are such a fast-moving market segment that I started to wonder whether there was a "stupid good" DAC, even better than the MF M1 DAC, that could be had for well under $1000.
I started a thread in the Amps/Preamps forum called "What's The Greatest Bargain in SET These Days" that yielded tons of great info. I hope this thread does, as well!
rebbi

Showing 2 responses by dgarretson

If into DIY, the Twisted Pear Buffalo DAC is a relatively easy kit to build-- requiring, however, a customer-supplied chassis. I've built several iterations from Buffalo II through Buffalo IIISE, in stereo and dual mono. The latest Placid 2.1 and AVCC regulator upgrades have raised the bar for TP and for all commercially available implementations of the ESS reference 9018 Sabre chip. Whatever your biases for or against the ESS chip, this one will astonish.
Ait, thanks. Amazing the various approaches taken by DIYers with the Twisted Pear kit.

I'm also using a transformer output from a battery-powered BIIISE, a 1:2 Audio Consulting Silver Rock transformer into balanced SS buffers. I may try a balanced 300b buffer as an alternative to SS. I have a Paul Hynes master regulator chassis on order to compare to battery power and to provide more rails for transition to CPU audio.

I was unaware of the Sonare USB board. What is its current requirement?