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April 27, 2008 - 9:33am
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Musical Fidelity A324 DAC. It's my personal favorite that can be had for around 600 on Audiogon.
Thanks, AlexO. I'll put it on my list.
Are you or anyone else out there familiar with the Stello DAC?
Best
S
I never heard of the Stello. My all time favorite DAC is the Mark Levinson 360S. It's expensive, running around $3k on the used market. Benchmark DAC 1, BelCanto, and Grace make pretty good DACs as well. I think that the Musical Fidelity is by far the best bang for the buck. At $600, nothing touches it.
You might as well look at the Quad CDp-2 which is at the same price point, a very good cd player, and loaded up with 4 digital ins to be used alternately as a DAC processor. Check www.underwoodhifi.com for current pricing. You will not be disappointed.
The Lite Audio DAC 38 T is a heck of a unit for $600 new.
The Lite Audio DAC 68 for $700 adds the warmth of tubes.
re Lite Audio, I appreciate the recommendation and checked out the website -- I'd like to know if it's been reviewed anywhere (technical measurements, critical listening and the like).
On the MF A324, I realize it got very favorably reviewed but that was 5 years ago and I'm wondering if there hadn't been advances in chip design sinc then that would make a difference to a medium-sensitive listener with a reasonably good playback system.
I haven't hard anything even remotely approaching the A324 at that price. Even the newer MF offerings like the XDAC v3 and v8 failed to impress me.
well, you couldn't ask for a stronger recommendation. and i have seen them on Audiogon in the 550 range.
If you're interested in some do it your self check out Evan's DAC. http://www.ezdiyaudio.com/
Cost me about $250.
I checked out the site. Very cool. If only I had the experience and time... but, alas, I have to get off-the-shelf stuff.
Altmann Attraction DAC (powered from a battery) with the JISCO jitter filter and Toslink input option. Works very well with my Macbook. You can try the pro TCElectronic Konnekt 8 as well, it can be connected to the Firewire connector of the Mac. It even can be used to connect the Konnekt 8's SPDIf output to the SPDIF in of the Altmann