Least expensive discrete resistor ladder NOS DAC?

If your talking about the BB 1704 U - K / J these days only the J version is available. They go for up to $200 per IC for a genuine one - lots of fakes out there. So for a complete DAC your budget will be hard to meet. A bargain in a R2R discrete DAC is the Denafrips DAC’s starting at $750 or so - the Ares their entry level one is an exceedingly good value. It has some interface challenges - impossible to read gray screen on black and 1mm LED indicators - other than that a great sounding unit.

Good Listening 

Peter

A bargain in a R2R discrete DAC is the Denafrips DAC’s starting at $750 or so - the Ares their entry level one is an exceedingly good value.

I believe all Denafrips are based on Sokeris module boards, and his complete dacs you would think will be worked out better being the designer.

http://www.soekris.dk/ the DAC1421 at 676euro is the pick, as it’s the same as the top of the line DAC1541 without the balanced output, saving $400euro

Cheers George

The Schiit and Soekris dacs aren't NOS dacs, they are r2r but oversampling.

In your budget you want the Holo Audio Spring, level 1 or 2:

https://kitsunehifi.com/product-category/brands/holo-audio/

OMG what a cool and esoteric niche oriented world we live in......

nitewulf
The Schiit and Soekris dacs aren’t NOS dacs, they are r2r but oversampling.

I know the Schiit isn’t NOS, but from what this seems to say, the Soekris has many user sellectable filters, and NOS mode is just but one of them.


Soekris Filters:

"The Soekris filters are the result of experimentation and evaluation-by-ear. In some cases, the “best sounding -or most likeable” filters are NOS or near NOS which measure the worse. Manufacturers filters are “short” vs longer filters in the Soekris DAC. This allows more experimentation and fine-tuning. As an example, the Soekris DAC filters can have up 1016 coefficients in FIR1 and up to 120 coefficients in FIR2."
"1021filtNewNOS NOS (Since there can only be one NOS filter, this is the only one to use)Latest iteration of the NOS filter which includes POS’s improved de-emphasis filter.”The NOS filter does not actually filter at all – all the coefficients are set to 1 so the audio is passed unaltered and is only up-sampled. The side effect is none of the mirror images of the original signal that appear in the up sampled signal are removed…””Listened to NQtb65, NQtb70 (see Nyquist filters below) and NewNOS today. All three are pretty nice. But NewNOS feels distinctively more dynamic, direct and more full-bodied…”

All Soekris user adjustable filters.
https://hifiduino.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/digital-filters-for-soekris-r-2r-dac/

Cheers George