American made USB DAC's

Thank you everyone for all your help and suggestions. I will research them all.

Be careful dealing with Ultra Fi. I got one of their USB DACs on demo and the owner Larry Moore refused to return it for a refund as agreed, I tried to call and email with no response and was even told by his "brother" when I called that he was in South America for an indefinite amount of time and could not be reached.

Gordon of Wavelength on the other hand is a real great guy, helpful and makes a great and beautiful product. I owned the Cosecant and it sounds great.

A great non American product is the MHDT labs products. I have the Paradisea + and the Constantine DACs and they both offer world class performance at a cheap price.

I second the Wavelenght dac, I have a Brick also and its great, Gordan is a great guy and make the best dacs IMHO. He has a new dac out or soon to be out that cost 900.00 and does 24/96. Greg

Has anyone done a/b comparison of Wavelength/Apogee mini/Benchmark/Nixon dacs? Can anyone comment on sonic profile of these vs. my Musical Fidelity Trivista21 dac?

Seems like a few threads have characterized the Benchmark as on the drier/detailed side, the Nixon and other NOS dacs as more "analogish" with good PRAT and perhaps less resolution in exchange for more forgiveness. How would you characterize the Brick,Apogee and MDHTs relatively speaking? Cheers,
Spencer

I did a head-to-head of the Apogee Mini-DAC and the Benchmark with a pal. Exact same system and music both times ( except see note below). We preferred the Apogee, you might not. It depends on your musical taste I think. The Benchmark has a sound others have called 'lean'. That's probably translatable into a frequency response chart but I think of it as in lean muscles--the sound was so detailed and focused it was like following the contours of a ripped bodybuilder's leg, arm, torso etc. compared with seeing the whole form. The Apogee OTOH didn't draw attention to detail but didn't seem to be missing any either. Instead the sound was about harmonics, clarity and following the flow of the whole.

It's not that I wasn't impressed by the Benchmark--I was very impressed. I wouldn't have missed hearing it but in the end I preferred to live with the Apogee. Oh, there was one surprise. That was the HF performance of the Benchmark. It was a bit hashy and poorly defined, cymbals white not metallic, that kind of thing. That may have been been because of setup -- the BM was running without a preamp, straight into the GamuT power amp, while the Apogee went through the ( GamuT ) preamp.