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Is it worthwhile to upgrade an old but quality DAC?

I am most interest to seek advice from DAC experts about potentially upgrading an old DAC. I have an old but excellent DAC, Altis Reference. It provides decent sound when connecting to CEC TL0 Transport. When comparing to streaming same music or song using Oppo 105  ( accessing  Tidal Master level file using Oppo which connects to Altis), my CD  provides better quality (both set ups uses decent interconnecting cables). Since Altis DAC can only transmit CD quality resolution 44KHz, I wonder if it can be upgraded to accept higher resolution from streaming (assuming the cost of upgrading is  reasonable  comparing to  buying a new DAC with similar quality sound ). If so, any recommendation of who can do such upgrade? Thank you very much for your advice.


moses189
hudsonhawk
137 posts
 
I personally don’t think so. DAC designs have come so far in the last few years, particularly in how they handle jitter, and they’re much more flexible and future proof now with networking capabilities and format handling.

I believe that Altis is almost 20 years old - I wouldn’t be surprised if a budget DAC from Schiit or iFi would sound better than it, let alone a modern high-end DAC.
johnss
564 posts
 
would agree with @hudsonhawk , even a Topping D10 or D30 are going to outperform your old DAC, have XMOS chip for USB input have the later chip set and will cost you less in the long run.


mahler123
3,031 posts
 
Agree.  Moses, come to the promised land of modern DACs
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,137 posts
 
Keep what you have now.  Higher sample and bit rates are good, but the primary advances in recent D/A technology have been in making 44/16 recordings sound their best.  From the description of your setup I assume you think the Altis sounds better than the Oppo at 44/16.  Does the Altis also sound better than the Oppo when the Oppo is using higher sample/bit rates?
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