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October 12, 2009 - 11:35am
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Unbelievable - An inexpensive twenty year old DAC with SUPERB sound
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The THETA PRO BASIC DAC is still in my system after close to 20 years, and is excellent. It was $2000 new, but I am sure that you could get one for a few hundred bucks used.
I have used it for many applications, but at present all I use it for is when one of us wants to use my old Yamaha 5-disc player (which has a coaxial digital output). By itself, it basically sounds rather bad, but through the Theta, with balanced connections to my preamp, it sounds fairly good.
Old stuff can beat a lot of new stuff if/when modded. I basically went pretty much all DIY a few years back and never regret that decision. E.g., I took a Musical Fidelity A324 DAC -- a class A Stereophile product for a few years -- and performed a few mods. Some suggestions for improving the stock A324 in myriad DIY audio/hi-fi forums:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-source/57887-musical-fidelity-a3-24-mods.html
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-source/94034-musical-fidelity-a3-24-repair.html
http://www.diyhifi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=27982#p27982
http://www.diyhifi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1178
The sound of the A324 was so greatly improved that I wonder what the hell "class A" really meant?
Moving on, I took an old Philips/Magnavox CD-650, did a couple of inexpensive mods, and bingo: WAY better sound than even the much-modded Musical Fidelity A324. I later expanded the mods to the CD-650 to include an external pwr supply, Pass/D1 I/V stage, etc., etc. And the sound is orders of magnitude better. But the beast is ugly:
Its sound is like Naim, but better than stock Naim; for DIY-modded Naim, see stuff like:
http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/showthread.php?t=23047
Some audiophiles talk about the