I recently heard a computer based system which used a Tube DAC made by Scott Nixon of Winston Salem, NC. It is a straight DAC with no filter and no upsampling. I did not understand how the data is clocked to the DAC.
Anyone using an Apogee Mini-Dac?
Recently, I ripped several hundred CD's uncompressed to the hard drive of my Mac G4 1.25 GHz Powerbook and played it through my system by taking the headphone OUT and splitting it into the R & L inputs in my pre-amp. Sounded suprisingly good. Better than CD's played on my $400 Denon DVD player. And that was from a Headphone out! Now, I have bought an M-Audio USB Audiophile DAC. This allows me to use the computer as a digital transport which feeds a digital signal to the DAC through the computer's USB port. This makes an incredible imrpovement to what was already pretty darn good sound. The M-Audio DAC cost around $175. Now, I'm curious. Apogee makes a similar USB DAC called the Mini-Dac, which goes for around $1,000. Anyone had any experience with these?