External DAC

[unrealrocks]

Well the time has come to add an external DAC to my system (among other things). I've been mainly looking at second hand DACs and I wondered if any of you had much experience with the budget end of external DACs.

I have been looking at the LINN Numerik DAC, they seem togo around £300 second hand (my budget is max that, lol). Also interested in a company called DS/D - theres a few of their DACs on eBay but can't really find much info on them.

Also - how much difference does the transport actually make to the sound? Surely if its totally in the digital domain apart from error correction it can't make that much difference?

[Howard]

Originally Posted by unrealrocks

Also - how much difference does the transport actually make to the sound? Surely if its totally in the digital domain apart from error correction it can't make that much difference?

It won't. Not in any form of decent hifi component anyway. DACs are where the business happens

[alexkoon]

I am interested also. I am looking at getting an Envy based sound card which can output sound digitally bit perfect (FLAC) to a decent DAC (and cheap!). This way I can get rid of another piece of my rack (an Arcam Alpha 8SE). What transport are you running now?

[unrealrocks]

See sig for my hifi

Not heard any Envy soundcards. I have a Mackie Onyx desk w/ Firewire as I do alot of mixing and recording That acts as my soundcard as well and sounds brilliant (I would hope so over over £500, lol).

[alexkoon]

The Envy is the Via Envy chipset - I was reading about it on some av forums. These Envy based cards apparently are very cheap and can output bit perfect digital streams to a DAC. So all you have to do is convert your CDs to FLAC and play through the PC via the Envy based soundcard to an external DAC. Heres a quote from somewhere based on a Chaintec AV710 soundcard which allows bit perfect streaming

"By transferring bit perfect representations of the original audio to an amp, you are making it one step closer to the artist?s idea of how it should be heard. That doesn't change the fact that the amp itself and speakers are going to colour the audio depending on their quality, but you are removing KMixer (or KMangler, as some call it) from the process. KMixer resamples all audio to 48KHz, the same as all internal Windows sounds and many DVDs. The change in frequency for audio CDs and MP3/WMA/FLAC is one thing (44.1KHz,) when it isn't done in a multiple of the original or to a high enough rate to make any kind of positive difference, but just the fact that it is resampling the audio without a well regarded algorithm for doing so. "

[Daneel]

NOS DACs have been raved about, have a google.