DAC comparison

I own an REF 9se… (technically a CD9SE). It is the best DAC I have ever heard… I had a Berkeley Alpha Reference 3 ($22K and highly rated) in my system with my ARC 9SE for several weeks… I fully expected to be coming up with another $5K for the Berkeley… but honestly the diffference was absolutely minuscule and tipped in the favor of the ARC… a tiny…tiny more flushed out sound.

I was pretty shocked when I heard the ARC… and went back and read reviews of previous models. They are very highly rated… so, I am sure there is not a huge differences between models. Tne strengths of the ARC is musicality, fully fleshed our sound that sounds natural. The detail is all there… but not pushed in your face… but very realistic. The 9 is definitely world class. I find it hard to believe the 8 isn’t relatively close. I have heard great things about it.

However, some folks want a lean, details forward sound… that is not ARC. You can see my system under my UserID. The ARC DAC… is simply amazing and completely complementary to the other ARC stuff to produce detailed musical sound. Obviously the sound I have been going for for decades.

DACs have come a long way in the last couple years. No longer is it necessary to trade off detail/resolution for naturalness/musicality or vise versa. I recently picked up a Meitner MA3 that I feel does a superb job at both: https://parttimeaudiophile.com/2022/07/08/meitner-ma3-dac-review/

https://www.stereophile.com/content/meitner-ma3-integrated-da-processor

And is has a great network streamer to boot.

Roon rock core Intel NUC >optical lan>PS audio network Bridge II >PS audio Perfect wave DAC Mk II. Such an eloquent solution.. perfect I2s integration without the need for cables. The whole streamer DAC problem is the connection and how the DAC can handle it. At least in my opinion. For what it's worth...

Get an RME ADE2 and get a pro quality transparent, solid build quality, no nonsense German component. It lives up to DACs five times its price that have "audiophile" fanfare etc. 

@ghdprentice 

 

You have an amazing dac in the refcd9se. The Dac8 is nowhere close. In fact, if you heard them both in your system you might wonder what was going on at ARC at the time. It was a reasonable dac if fed a low jitter signal through spdif/aes but its usb implementation was ill conceived.