I am a vinyl as well as digital kind of listener and have listened to my system with both a Transporter and an SB3 which is kind of the same thing as listening to an SB3 with a DAC and without a DAC. I think as a primary source you are going to want to add a DAC. The SB3 is, for me, a background kind of source in my system(detailed below) whereas the Transporter is competetive with top sources. I find the SB3 to be a bit soft at the frequency extremes with a poor sense of air and space, i.e., it lacks the "black" background of better equipment, but hey, its 300 bucks!! Again, I have not listened to my SB through any DAC other than the Transporter's digital inputs, which were a big upgrade. (And, I might add, not much different than just listening to the Transporter, which was maybe a bit more authoritative without having to deal with getting the data on a cable.) I am not an expert on DAC's but lots of people here and on ther forums seem to like the Benchmark DAC1 and Lavry. I believe that both are in your 1k price range. By the way, you can gen some sense of this from looking up reviews of the SB3 at Steophile and Enjoy the Music.com as well. Good listening.
-- rplert Randy Lert Linn LP12, Transporter, Linn Sondek CD12, Ayre C5xe, VTL 7.5 Reference Line Stage, Ayre P5xe phone stage, Ayre V1 amplifer, Vandersteen 5A speakers ------------------------------------------------------------------------ rplert's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8358 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31053 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
