I've owned some older Audio Alchemy dacs, some decent CD players, and a CAL Alpha DAC which was one of my better hifi purchases some time ago. A while back I started out looking for a cheap DAC to connect my cable box and DVD player to in a 2.1 system used mostly for music. What I ended up with was a Channel Islands Audio VDA 2 DAC. What was going to be an auxilary digital source ended up being my main source. For $599 this dac is awesome. I don't know how digital can sound any better without spending three or four times as much. I had listened to the Benchmark dac several times and preferred the VDA 2's sound and simplicity. There are only two switches, a quality chipset, and discrete output. Nothing against the DAC 1 it's nice, but I wouldn't use it for anything other than a DAC so I thought I'd be paying for stuff I wouldn't use.
An antiquated DAC or an affordable recent one?
An inexpensive digital to analog converter is next on the purchase list. Should I opt for something new, (such as a Musical Fidelity V-Dac or Cambridge Audio Dac-Magic) or retro (like a Theta Chroma 396, Ps Audio Superlink or Adcom 600)? It is now, sadly, only listening via Sennheiser Hd 580 and Creek OBH-11, with a cheap Cd player. Rock and pop are the musical tastes.