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Where to go from here?

I have a treated dedicated room with pmc ci140 speakers. So my room and speakers are done. Now i need to get the front end up to par. The pmc speakers are being fed by a denon 3700h to monolith amplifier.  I rather not get hung up on which brand is best but what makes a bigger positive improvement? I can purchade a reference dac with volume like a weiss 501 or tambaqui, or i could buy a quality integrated like a mcintosh ma9500 or hegel 590. If i get the weiss or tambuqui it will be awhile until my wallet cools off, so i would keep the monolith amp for a few years. If i get a quality integrated it would be a few yrs until i got a reference seperate dac. Sooooo......what the heck makes sense and which would make the biggest improvement?  Thanks

davekuyt11

Showing 1 response by yyzsantabarbara

yyzsantabarbara
5,026 posts
 

That KRELL K-300i is an awesome integrated. The internal DAC is good, and if you desire can upgrade later to an external DAC. You can get close to Mola Mola Tamabqui sound for much, much less. Spending a lot of DAC helps the audio industry and the economy keep moving. However, your ears you likely will be OK with something in the $1500-$3000 range (my ears are). 

A super neutral $719 Topping D90LE mates well with the warm K-300i. In my opinion, the Toppng D90SE (or LE), Benchmark DAC3B, Musetec 005 are better than the internal DAC. The internal DAC is not bad, just that the others that are good matches for the K-300i.

I still always recommend the internal DAC in the K-300i because it is good enough and it has HDMI which is great on that unit. The ROON READY on the K-300i is the very best I have ever used. It has volume adjustment from the ROON Client app. I do not know of any other unit that can do that.

 

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