affordable DAC for rock/metal

Mapman
Okay accept how do you get that balance when most of these recordings are far from Neutral!
Thats kinda the point, some heavy metal discs take heavy doses of equalization in the first place to bring back the missing clarity, full vocal sound, and bottom end bass. So thats the only reason I suggest tilting the spectrum the other way, especially with Klipsch and Onkyo gear, they are much more steril and thin by nature in many cases. Dynamic yes, but neutral?...

Undertow,

No easy answer

The recordings are what they are as you point out and are rarely perfect.

Better to get what you can out of a variety of recordings regardless of the flaws and not try to make a particular flawed recording sound "right".

Only you can judge what sounds best to you in your system. Some systems benefit from injecting a little warmth and others do not for sure.

I agree, but I guess that’s the point of asking the question "Whats best for this" Nothing will be best for it all at once.. Getting close enough universally is the name of the game.

Undertow,.....I'm glad someone else understands what I'm trying to say. First of all, I'm a beer budget guy, so I'm pretty limited on what I can work with. It's been easiest to "synergize" my current system for certain music types, and getting acceptable results from many of my hard rock CD's has been an effort.

My previous CDP was a well regarded budget unit, and although I enjoyed how detailed and deep it sounded, it's overall balance was tilted more towards the treble, and some of my rock CD's had become painful to listen to. The last time I enjoyed these CD's was a couple years prior, when using a Theta Chroma 386 dac (I started to regret selling it).

I decided to try a couple popular DACS, and the Valab was one of them. It was decent, overall. Sounded smooth and dynamic from top to bottom, but sounded less 3d and lifelike, then what I was used to. AT one point, I popped in a rock CD, that I would be hard pressed to listen through just a single track, on my player (Linkin Park's "Meteora", and I ended up sitting through the whole CD, and listening at the highest volume level I've ever had my system at, and I really enjoyed it. I now understood why so many people say the Valab is a very easy dac to listen to, and just enjoy the music.

I ended settling on a completely different CDP, which has turned out to be a balanced compromise between musicality and critical detail, and I'm once again enjoying a wider range of not only music types, but recording/mixing qualities.

BTW, I'm using Magnepan IIc's with less then optimal room placement, so you can imagine my difficulties in "rocking the house", although I am using dual Velodyne servo subs, which greatly helps.