One DAC/integrated you could be happy with forever?

I enjoy my Audio Research GSI75. I've had alot of fine gear, this piece gets it pretty darn right. I can understand at its $16,000 price it didn't fly off the shelves. Additionally, many of our peers prefer multiple boxes which is fine too. Horses for courses.

Nothing is permanent.

I adore my Soekris dac1541 DAC/amp combo.

While it is integrated and has a very decent built in amplifier, I do feed its differential balanced output into a Mjölnir Audio’s Pure BiPolar* balanced headphone amp.

The only other amp that approaches the insane gain of the BiPolar is another very high bias solid state amp, the Pass Labs’ own headphone amp.

I’m driving a set of LCD-4 with the fully balaned end to end Dac/Amp one/two punch and I can say i’ll be able to listen to this system end of my days to these and never be disappointed.

* Mjölnir Audio is a one man botique amplifier maker out of Iceland and not to be confused with the model of headphone amplifier also named Mjölnir produced by Schiit. (That is like confusing a McLaren with a nice but consumer level sports car!)

@erik_squires

I have only seen Lyngdorf, Roon, Benchmark and Stereophile’s Jim Austin mention the inter-sample over problem. For such a serious problem affecting nearly all pop/rock it doesn’t seem over hyped. Obviously most manufacturers would rather not admit they have a problem. It is not easy to correct unless you add additional digital processing in front of and separate from the DAC chip.

@shadorne 

I'm going to have to re-read this, but my hazy memory is that this problem ONLY occurs as a result of upsampling. 

If you don't upsample, you don't have the problem to begin with. 

Best,

Erik