1K dac

I second the recommendation of the EE MiniMax DAC. What a honey of a unit!

I've heard the Dac section on the 160D is good. If you can find one used for 1k it would be nice.

Hi Customoco, I just received my Squeezebox Touch this very afternoon and am looking forward to trying it out later with my HK990 integrated amp, which has an inbuilt DAC section.

Before getting this amp, I'd drawn up a shortlist of SPDIF DACs to do exactly what you're intending.

I'd throw these out there in your price range as they seemed well-engineered and good amount of positive feedback on the web:

Audio GD NFB-1 or NFB8 (dual Wolfson chips, discrete output)
Audiolab 8200CDQ (Sabre DAC, Preamp, CDP, async USB, class A output, extensive power regulation)
Bel Canto DAC 1.5 (I used to have a Bel Canto DAC 2 I liked)
Eastern Electric Minimax Plus (upgraded version of the unit lots of people have been raving about)

I'd probably have gone for the Audiolab as it seems a digital swiss-army knife, and was designed by John Westlake of Pink Triangle and Dominik Pleko, who is a super smart guy who once modded my soundcard many, many years ago :)
- they also designed the DAC sections of the Peachtree gear

Good luck with your search!

hi
thanks to you all for your help.

does anyone know the dac(s) compare to a red wine audio isabellina?

I think that you should look into a Scott Nixon Tube DAC any other model that he offers. These are all non-oversampling DACs, just FYI
http://www.scott-nixon.com/