MBlue72;577303 Wrote: > Hello: > > Ive been a very satisfied user of a Squeezebox 3 for more than three > years. It is being driven by an HP computer over our wireless network. > Although Ive been pleased with the SB I now want to improve the sound > quality and am considering the purchase of a DAC. Expense is a > consideration so I have been researching DACs in the $400-700 range. > The front runner at this point is the Cambridge Audio Dac Magic which > is available for $429 from Audio Advisor. Obviously, purchasing a Touch > (with its DAC chip) for $299 is an alternative. > > Of course, there are additional advantages to either strategy. If I > purchase the Touch, I free up the SB for use elsewhere in our home. If > I purchase a DAC, I can also feed my older Sony CD player through it to > the rest of my system. > > I welcome your opinions on which of these two options would give me the > best sound quality. > > My equipment is a bit older (but much loved!). I have a McIntosh C37 > preamp and a McIntosh MC7300 amp driving a pair of Klipschorn > speakers. > > Thanks for any input you can give. > > Dave
My take is that you'll be able to achieve the most spectacular bang for the buck if you buy the Touch and then feed its bit-perfect signal into Beresford Caiman DAC. However, take the above with a grain of salt, because even though the improvements brought to you with the above configuration will be nothing short of spectacular, if your downstream system is not up to the snuff, you won't be able to detect any improvements. If, on the other hand, you feed the analog signal from the Caiman DAC into a high end power amp and then into a high end pair of speakers, you literally won't be able to believe your own ears. I have experienced this incredible improvement once I plugged the audio signal coming out of Beresford Caiman DAC into a pair of Magnepane speakers. I was literally blown away. But then, in a comparative listening scenario, when I replaced my Maggies with several other boxed speakers, all those finer points in sound simply folded, and then the other DACs ended up sounding disappointingly similar to the Caiman. Moral of the story -- you need to have sufficiently sophisticated set of components downstream from the DAC to be able to truly assess and judge any improvements. -- magiccarpetride ------------------------------------------------------------------------ magiccarpetride's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37863 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067
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