Looking for my first DAC

Curiousjim,

I use a Schiit Bifrost Multibit with one of my office systems. I have been very happy with it. It sounds great, especially for the price. If you are concerned about MQA, DSD or other formats of questionable value and low adoption, then this DAC is not for you. If you just want a really good sounding DAC for a reasonable price, you would be hard presssed to find better.

If you happen to find yourself well funded, take a look at the Mytek Brooklyn DAC+. I use one in my main system. It runs about $2k. It slices, it dices, it chops and handles every format known to man. Assuming that is out of your range though, the Schiit Bifrost will give you years of service.

Has anyone suggested the Mytek Liberty?  I think it goes for around a grand.  I haven’t heard it but I used to own the Manhatten, which was an extremely impressive DAC

Mahler123,

Thanks for recommending the Liberty. I realized right after I hit send that the Liberty would be a good choice for him. You are right, it retails for $1k.

Lots of good info here.  Just to revisit some of them, it would be helpful to know what aspects of sound reproduction are important to you and/or what things are you looking improve upon. 

I had an Oppo transport fail on me, so u know where I stand on upgrading the Oppo.  

Also, has anyone been able to compare the Liberty to the Bifrost?  And, how are they at jitter reduction?  The Oppo ain't a super transport in stock form, so if neither DAC has great jitter reduction I'd recommend including something like the Empirical Audio Offramp.  Jitter can make digital sound so, well, digital.  You can always add one later I suppose.  Anyway, best of luck. 

Soix,

i have not compared the Liberty directly to the Bifrost, but I have compared the Brooklyn to the Bifrost. The Brooklyn is essentially the Liberty’s prosumer big brother. The major differences can be understood in this review of the Liberty-

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/reviews/entry/mytek-liberty-digital-to-analog-converter

In my opinion, both DAC’s are phenomenal and have both been compared with DAC’s many times their price. I don’t find the SQ to be vastly different between the two. The major difference for me and the reason the Brooklyn takes front and center in my main system, is the plethora of connectivity options and features like HT passthrough and balanced outputs and balanced headphones with a nice OLED display and remote. The Bifrost is much more bare bones, but it does exactly what it promises, no more or less. The Bifrost is good enough to still have a home in my stack and if my Brooklyn kicked the bucket for some reason, I would not lose a lot of sleep over promoting the Bifrost back to front line duty.