Looking for a DAC that has..

"It seems on this forum a lot of people like Metrum Octave or Eastern Electric dac. What would be your recommendation for use with Synchro-mesh+AppleTV? Will I be able to hear improvement over ECD-1 dac?"

Yes, the Metrum or even a W4S DAC2 will be an improvement over the ECD-1. The D/A module in it is dated.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Hi Edorr, a lot of thanks to you and Steve. If we hadn't had this thread, I'm not sure how much time and money I would waste more. Can't wait for the Synchro-mesh and during the meantime I'm thinking of acquiring a dac for comparison with my ECD-1 dac.

Regarding Metrum Octave, I read somewhere it uses 4 chips for analog conversion. Two 16-bit DAC equals to a single 32-bit DAC, no? Total of 4 chips for 2 channels?

Or someone with Octave can easily detect in their listening while playing 24/96 material? Chopping off 8 bits seems like a lot.

For me, the Synchro-Mesh provides significant improvements in sound quality being placed between a Bolder modded Logitech Touch and an Eastern Electric DAC2 with DEXA discrete opamps. I've also used an OPPO BDP-95 at the front end of the chain with equally impressive results.

Prior to the Synchro-Mesh arrival, I used the Touch for casual listening owing to its convenience and struggled with the DLNA interface on the BDP-95 for when I wanted better sound quality.

Soundstage, detail and clarity are at all time highs with this current system iteration and I find myself spending more time in my listening chair and less at the keyboard.

I've had my Synchro-Mesh since the end of July and feel that you may well be better off with it and a lesser DAC than with a much more expensive DAC by itself. You really develop a sense for what the Synchro-Mesh does when you listen with it engaged for a while then turn it off.

Correction: Octave uses total of 8 "industrial" dac chips, 4 per channel. I couldn't find anywhere on the net what those dac are. It seems Metrum really goes out of their way to protect this. The only info I could find is they aren't originally made for audio use but for other high speed real world applications such as data collection.

Njs, thanks for sharing the experience. Not that I'm not convinced with synchro-mesh but it's very comforting to hear what you said.