Back to the DAC

@worldwidewholesales great insight, but I think for the general audio enthusiast and most general homeowners, it’s difficult to test hundreds of DAC, let alone 5, before purchasing.

It also seems that most DACs now come with a pre-amp function and optional network hook-ups.

Room treatments are super important as well, but many of us don’t have dedicated listening spaces so there has to be a balance between good acoustics and room functionality. I put up a bunch of panels in my room and I don’t think it sounds much better and they look like crap, so I think I’m going to take them all down now. Not looking forward to fixing/painting all those darns holes in my brand-new dry wall either!

And DAC prevalence over a pre-amp, that’s quite a revelation, thanks Bob.

In relation to a dac, if you are using usb, then you will never get the best sound quality from the dac. The best interfaces to a dac are Ethernet and i2s and some of the best dacs don’t even include usb. I have a highly rated dac that I used Ethernet for the past few years, which was much better than using the usb interface. I just bought a new streamer to allow me to use i2s and still keep my Roon server running in a different room. I2s was a nice bump of sq over using Ethernet.

@rbstehno My Aurender N200 is optimize for USB out, so I need select a DAC with solid USB implementation. My Wyred 4 Sound 2v2 SE DAC was the same. You have to match the equipment's compatibility.

What DAC is it you use?

@rbstehno that’s a blanket statement and those are usually incorrect.