Apogee is a highly respected brand and a recording industry standard for A/D and D/A conversion. They're not the only product out there, but their offerings should sound very good in their price range. I haven't heard many raves for the M-Audio Audiophile DAC. I'm pretty sure the Apogee would be a huge improvement. You might also want to consider your preamp and speakers/headphones. Are they capable of portraying the difference between the $175 DAC and the $1000 DAC? If not, you might want to save you money and enjoy the M-Audio DAC.
Anyone using an Apogee Mini-Dac?
Recently, I ripped several hundred CD's uncompressed to the hard drive of my Mac G4 1.25 GHz Powerbook and played it through my system by taking the headphone OUT and splitting it into the R & L inputs in my pre-amp. Sounded suprisingly good. Better than CD's played on my $400 Denon DVD player. And that was from a Headphone out! Now, I have bought an M-Audio USB Audiophile DAC. This allows me to use the computer as a digital transport which feeds a digital signal to the DAC through the computer's USB port. This makes an incredible imrpovement to what was already pretty darn good sound. The M-Audio DAC cost around $175. Now, I'm curious. Apogee makes a similar USB DAC called the Mini-Dac, which goes for around $1,000. Anyone had any experience with these?
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- 8 posts total
- 8 posts total