I think you could put the Schiit Freya + on your list. Quite a bit below your 2500 price range but if you put some nice tubes in it, it really comes to life. I have both the Freya + with CBS Hytron tubes and the Benchmark LA4 and I prefer the sound of the Freya + with of course the tube circuit engaged.
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Popular opinion suggests a linestage should do little other than provide source switching and volume control. It should add/subtract nothing sonically, and just be a transparent conduit between a source and amplifier. That specification may or may not suit your system. If it does, then a Wyred 4 Sound STP SE with level 2 upgrade is the closest thing I’ve come across to achieving those goals. It isn’t very sexy, but boy does it sound like nothing. |
these days, with very pure sounding dacs using built in volume controls, it is very easy to test and hear the effect of a linestage interceding between source and power amp there is no linestage, tube or ss, active or passive, that sounds like nothing - there is always a change, a difference just like there is a difference if one changes the interconnects it is never the same, one just needs to decide if the change is positive or negative for oneself |
@jjss49 - so true, and even adding one of the best implementations of a DAC volume control can change the sound of the DAC, as I learned when I owned both the Metrum Pavane (no VC) and their Adagio (basically the same DAC with VC) |
i hear you... volume control implementation is quite an art in and to itself i had the sonnet morpheus, which had a volume control, supposedly a later gen adagio in a smaller enclosure re the pavane vs adagio, it could be the volume control, or one has to wonder if it might be even unit to unit variations, i remember at one point i had two schiit yggy's, same spec, same gen, and one sounded noticeably warmer than other... go figure! one can drive oneself kinda crazy if the ocd/analytical bent is indulged to a fault |
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