$1300-1500 DAC

@big_greg the idea of a tube DAC is intriguing! 

@plga I’ll look into that, it’s my bedroom system so I’m going to be feeding it with a blusound node 2i for now. I have all the tweaks (power, acoustics, subs, noise harvesters, fuses, etc) on my main system. 

@piga  so I had this humming sound in one of my speakers and I tried everything to get noise out of my line including the PS audio Noise harvester of which I have 3,  they were blinking like crazy .  Anyway time went by and I kept trying one more things to get this noise out of my system then one day when I was cleaning out the garage I unplugged one of those bug zapper lights I went back inside to get something to drink and boom Immediately noticed the noise was gone.  I went and looked at my noise harvesters and they had stopped blinking.  The bug zapper was putting DC noise on the line.  I don’t know if they remove noise but I know they can tell you how crummy your electricity is . 

My main system has a Simaudio Moon 280d 

I think that I’m just now finding out that the node 2i will ONLY OUTPUT 24/96 over coax! What kind of crap is that? The whole reason I bought the thing is for a streamer, and to use and external DAC with it. Urgggghhh 

@plga ok, so I see that the SOtM sms-200 is on sale on their website for $450. I can buy that and use the node 2i in my garage system/theatre. It has usb out. The schiit Gungnir DAC has usb in. Something they have called generation 5 usb that apparently it’s quite nice. So maybe I’ll go that route. 

Please tell me me about the converter your using and what it does. 

I just heard from bluesound support that the node2i will pass whatever signal and bitrate comes to it via tidal or Roon or whatever along to my DAC. The only exception is MQA which will only be 24/96. 
See below: 
“

Tony W. - Product Support Manager (Bluesound) 

Oct 2, 4:59 PM EDT 

Hi Andrew

When using digital outs on the NODE, with MQA we do have to handle some processing but that is only for MQA. With all other formats, you bypass the onboard DAC altogether. The output will be whatever the original file was encoded at.

I hope that helps explain it,

Tony

Thanks for everyone’s opinions! I scored a brand new schiit Gungnir Multibit from a fellow A’goner for $850. Too good a deal to pass. I’m using a Black Cat Cables silverstar 75ohm BNC to connect the node2i to the Multibit. It sounds great. 

@vogueot i too learned a ton in this thread. The orchid DAC looked amazing to me. But I got a great deal on the Gumby and it sounds great. I have fully balanced tube preamp so I like that the Gungnir is also fully balance, and some of the cold exactness of a Multibit DAC is rounded and warmed buy the tubes. 
Dacs and tubes can be very synergistic