Lateral move or real upgrade?

If you go with the bifrost make sure you...
- get the UBER analogue upgrade
- get a good power cable - like those from Signal Cable should suffice
- get a really good interconnect - again, the silver Resolution interconnect from Signal cable is great value for money

The Bifrost will reward you - it's a great DAC and it responds extremely well to the above tweaks. There's more in that box than meets the eye!

I have the Bifrost and in my system it's kicking some much higher priced butt

Granted, better cables will up the anti on any DAC, but the bifrost seems to excel when given the right cabling.

Regards

Oooops, one last item...

I also second the Audirvana route - I also tried Bitperfect, but found Aurdirvana to be much better and it integrates nicely with iTunes, which I control from my droid tablet with 'Retune", another very good program.

I use all three inputs on the Bifrost and cannot discern any difference, so the coax input is very good. For that I am using a Van den Hul "The Name" which works extremely well.

I like the fact the Bifrost does not upsample. Upsampling on a previous DAC was not done well and put me off.

I also like the fact that the Bifrost does 24/192 on all three inputs and you can grade to the USB at a later date.

Hope this helps

You do not have to uninstall Bitperfect, just disable it.

I setup Audirvana so that it does not upsample and disabled volume controls and equalizer functions - just playback of the digital data right from the files.

Audirvana support is also very responsive - had to email them a couple of times at first - they have a good online PDF manual - see support

It will also play flac files via iTunes using proxy files - see the manual for a full description of what you need to do - really simple and works.

It is a little tricky to setup if your music files are on a NAS drive - the proxy files have to be on the hard of the computer running Audurvana.

Regards.

I would probably agree with Rotarius if you are going with the standard Bifrost, but with the UBER analogue upgrade you in effect getting an analogue section that is from the Gungnir - which I think would be a noticeable upgrade.

From their web site...

" This DAC/Analog upgrade card improves the sonic and measured performance of Bifrost, using a discrete, direct-coupled gain stage from Gungnir. This discrete stage is more sophisticated than the base Bifrost, with a more complex topology, and DC servo to eliminate capacitors in the signal path and to improve on the already impressive performance of the AKM4399 D/A converter."

It does sound sweet - Regards

Don't see any problem with that - if works for your current config then it should be ok with the Bifrost. Saves you $150 as well :-)

What computer are you using?
Does it have optical out?
e.g. the headphone socket on current mac's is dual use for optical out also - you just need the 3.5mm optical adapter from ebay

I've tried both USB and optical on my mac and cannot tell any difference, except that the mac has an upper limit of 24/96 on the optical out for some reason only known to Apple.

Regards.

Just looked it up and the macbook pro has it, but not the air

The v-link is your best option - stick with that

Regards