Home Source Components

I've made an audio friend down here who imports the dCS range and has a slightly-used Debussy he's looking to unload at an advantageous (though still eye watering) price. Does the HC brain trust have an opinion on the dCS house sound in general or their Ring DAC topology in particular? I will have a chance to live with it in my system for a while before making any decisions. Another option is to wait for the first shipment of the new DAC from Aesthetix, who he also carries. The Pandora uses (as I understand it) roughly the same digital board as my current Ayre QB9, but with a beefed-up power supply and analog section (and toobs, obviously). Charles Hansen has been repping…

I have a DAC1 USB to a Luxman P1u to a pair of HD820. Should I do better than the DAC1? I have limited space. Probably pointless to upgrade. Wish I had a DAC still that would not fit there:

I got mine from Price Japan for $675 shipped EMS to the US. I like it a lot. Supposed to share internal design with Aqvox, but not as many options available at the front panel.

So yesterday I get home from a long day at work. I eat my dinner then I go upstairs, and turn on my amp to warm up. I boot my tower (transport), and after a little bit I cue up an album, put on my w100 and ... nothing. I play with some settings on my computer... nothing. I try my 701...nothing I tunr off my amp, reseat the tube.. nothing I plug my CD player into my DAC, put in a disc...nothing I try my reciever...nothing I plug my amp directly into my DVD player's analog out... SOUND As I'm moving gear around, I realize there is water on everything, and it was jsut POURING rain about an hour ago. Pissed, I go downstairs: "mom did you have my window open"…

For sale on Head-foo. Probably a very decent source. http://www.head-fi.org/forums/showpost.php?p=3213733&postcount=1

At Auriculares.org, the Spanish headphones forum a mate has posted a link to an Ebay shop in Taiwan. They sell a NOS DAC with USB and coax inputs, which doesn't look bad at all and is selling for USD180. I wonder if any of you have tried that unit or has some reliable third party opinions. I'd be glad reading them

I see, on the Rega web site, that they have just released the Saturn. And you can read the details there.

Hi all, Looking at getting something like the Trends UD-10. Basically just want a quick and dirty USB-Toslink convertor. Looked at the Hagerman units and they only have coax or AES/EBU. Any suggestions would be welcome. If you know of a place to get the Trends cheap, that would be great as well. Thanks, Jay

Size is getting to be important and looking for a small cheap CDP with digital outs. Coming to you all for help. Used fine. Haven't had luck finding much, but something along the lines of this would work. Otherwise seems to be more DVD players (though not always with displays) in this range. Basically going for a Squeezebox/Lavry/GS-1 rig so trying to keep width near or less than 10". And Dusty Approved Black. Anyone know of any CD models I should consider or DVD players usable with an external display? If only my DVD-2900 was about a quarter its size.

Ever since getting my APL modded philips sacd 1000 (which I have loved) I have been hearing that APL would release its own dac and transport at somepoint. Looks like the time for that has come: http://www.aplhifi.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=431 Time to start saving up

looks like a pretty interesting combo. still looking for that perfect <$1000 dac.. anyone have any experience with the p-3a in particular? this combo is years old but hey, worth a shot. has i2s which is nice. i think modwright has a mod for these.. edit: yes, they do.

I currently have a X-Fi Elite pro containing the CS4398 DAC which it seems to share in common with headroom's ultra micro DAC. Is this an adequate DAC? Should I look to upgrade? I have a incoming beta22 and a friend mentioned that the sound card dosen't have a proper "line out" to run to the b22. Thoughts?

Needing something small-ish that had some sort of digital output. USB is fine. I'd like to send the output to a DAC as well as have some kind of internet connectivity. For starters, I'm not a big apple fan, but am willing to give it a try if it's far away the best source. I'd probably bring it to work and rock out there, then bring it home for moving tunes on to it if need be. 3G not necessary, wifi would be fine. I'd be keen onand Android tablets, but Google continues to skip implementing USB host mode. That is, USB host mode without some damn cable hack. Comments? Suggestions? OK. Thanks! Brian

Might be useful to a few folks if the price is not too outrageous.

Hi, I'm thinking of getting a Lavry DA10 but from the pictures I see, it only has XLR outputs. Can I connect it to my single-ended amp using XLR to RCA cables? Will there be any problems in doing so? Also, I don't need the headphone out on the DAC. Is there any DAC with equivalent quality but doesn't have a headphone out (and cheaper)? Thanks!

Teaser: So my local dealer has the entire Audio Aero CD player lineup, SE & non SE, but they were always setup in different systems and I never got to hear them on the same gear. Until this past weekend. In short, the SE is better, but I still don't think it's worth nearly as much as they're charging for the upgrade, which is quite a few hundred bucks. As a person who knows which end of a soldering iron to hold, chances are I could do the upgrade myself for a hell of a lot less. Of course, if one can afford a Capitole at retail prices, money probably isn't an issue. Gear: Artemis Labs LA-1 linestage and SP-1 power amp, with Wilson-Benesch Discovery speakers. I w…

My apologies if this has been posted before, but hadn't seen much info on this one: [/snip] [The dock features] Analog Devices AD21369 32-bibit floating-point digital signal processing core and 96kHz/24-bit converters for analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog, resulting in a 110dB dynamic range with distortion of under .004 percent. The dock will also include DSP technologies for improving sound quality: Adaptive Dynamics (restores the sound quality of compressed audio), X-Matrix (virtual surround sound for two speakers or headphones), and Extrapolator, which turns the iPod's stereo signal to 5.1- or 7.1-channel sound. All of these signal processors have separ…

Hey- Bit of a bummer. Got my Quad CDP-2 on Monday, and a problem manifested itself late Wednesday evening. Large amounts of distortion started coming out of the left channel. I tried everything: switching interconnects, switching inputs on my amp, different digital cables (even though the distortion is also present when playing a CD), different power cords, and different power outlets. The distortion is present out of both the fixed and variable outputs of the CDP-2. Its not the speakers, because my 840C and TT perform fine. The weird thing is the distortion doesn't show up until the player has been playing for 3-4 hours. I'm starting to feel crazy, because …

I know that Audio-gd products are not popular here, but under my budget, I'm looking at Audio-gd NFB-11(Sabre32 9018 ) and NFB-12(dual WM8741s). Since they are the same design except for the D/A chip, I'd like to know how Sabre32 9018 compared to WM8741. There are negative comments about 9018. DIY'ers didn't like the fact that the chip cannot be obtained thru "normal means" nor even the white paper. MSB even concluded: "So the hot new 32 bit DAC is actually a 6 bit DAC! Right from their own white paper. It is undoubtably a good DAC for the mass consumer market it was designed for. It is certainly nothing of interest to the high-end community, especially as the the D…

Me again... So, I'm now looking for a decent phono stage. I've decided that I am going to place my turntable at the back of my room (17ft from front to back). Basically, I want to keep the analog rig far away from the subs etc. at the front of the room. The cartridge is a Clearaudio Accurate and here are the specs on that:

Because through a series of strange machinations a Revox B-77 and several tapes have found their way here free gratis. I'm reading google things and it came with the manual and stuff. Is this a format worth getting into?

Price unknown, but if it's sensible they should sell plenty. Since this is almost certainly using the exact same receiver board that's in the Wavelength and Ayre USB DACs, it'll probably also be upgradable to support 192kHz sample rates eventually.

I own an NM24 DAC by Monarchy Audio. This unit sports a tube dac, an ss dac, and a tube line stage and has been my main dac for about 19 months. So far I have been very satisfied and recently I was thinking of a way to further improve its performance. Thus I thought of getting the Monarchy DIP/Upsampler. The DIP/Upsampler Combo sells for $399 and its specs are ... Decodes 16 to 24 Bits Inputs: Opto, Coax, AES/EBU Balanced Outputs: Coax, AES/EBU Balanced Upsamples from 44.1 to 48 or 96 Khz (user selectable) Outputs 24 Bits Has anyone here used one? Thanks.

I've been looking for internal photos of the Reimyo CDP-777 since the thought first entered my mind that I might own one. Over the past 11 months when the occasion presented itself, I have done numerous in depth searches for such images, but to no avail. so as far as I know, these are the first internal pictures posted on the net. enjoy the gut pics of my CDP777...

Oppo BDP-93 Networking Universal Blu-ray Player — Reviews and News from Audioholics There's a lot more to this article including pretty pictures so just click on the link. This is a no brainer for me. It's coming out around November of this year. I'll be preordering first chance I get. The 80 is discontinued. I'll be surprised if they discontinue the 83s vs logical price drops. That's the same video processor, probably slightly refined, that the now completely obsolete $2000 Pioneer 09FD has. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a new chip. ' There WILL be an SE variant to this new 93 well into 2011 sometime. I ordered an 83 direct from Oppo ba…