There have been some small technical improvements over the years but I am not a big believer that DAC's have improved significantly in the last 10-15 years. What has changed recently is there is a number of very good value priced dacs that come close to matching much more expensive DAC's. I sell the Lavry DA10 and BEnchmark DAC1 they are extrememly good and great value but they really are not quite as good as the top class dac's around.
A month or 2 ago I compared the DA10 and DAC1 against a 10 year old Wadia 25 DAC, my vote went to the Wadia, closely followed by the LAvry with the DAC1 lagging a little way further behind. The Wadia also had the best build quality , more connections, a remote, more inputs and a much better quality inbuilt preamp etc, so not only did it sound a fraction better it was a better overall DAC. The price of the Wadia 25 second hand was on par with the DA10 and DAC1 bought new. No doubt the reason why the Wadia sounded better was the quality of the output stage was higher than thet of the DA10. Do not let the age of a DAC fool you there are many DAC's now selling for around the US$1000 mark that cost a fortune when new and will match and surpass even the great value DAC's like the DA10. -- dlite ------------------------------------------------------------------------ dlite's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4885 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32336 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
