I just resurrected an old DAC that I had and put it in a different system and am very pleased. I had a PS Audio Digital Link 3 sitting on a basement shelf. It’s about 10 years old and was formerly in my two channel system. It’s major weakness was that it didn’t have an asynchronous USB, and as I started to get into computer audio that became a liability, as the usb sounded awful. I had bought some sort of reclocker device from Musical Fidelity that was a very unreliable device and ultimately I added an Oppo 105 to my system and began to use the Oppo as my DAC and kicked the DLink to the curb. I meant to sell it off but forgot about it
My 14 year old Plasma display broke in my Surround Sound System . The Oppo had been moved to this system but now it was
incompatible with the new 4K display. I swapped an Oppo 203, which was doing transport duty in the 2 channel system, for the 105 in the Surround system, since the 203 is compatible with the newer display. However, I had been using the 105 as a DAC for a Bluesound Node2 in that System, and the 203 was clearly a step down from the 105 as a DAC. So I dusted off the PS Audio DAC and it was a Wow! moment. The Node2 just snapped into focus.
I then used the coax out from the 203 into the PS Audio DAC and Redbook CD from the Oppo 203 sounds great, much better than from just using the 203 DAC.
So are newer DACs better? I don’t know, man. There is a lot of life in some of these old geezer components. Now, if that was only true for their owners ad well...
