Thinking about getting a R2R DAC

Audio GD makes an excellent one.  I will use the word "excellent" as a conservative description. You rarely see any of their equipment for sale second hand, but every other brand you do.  There is a reason.
If you have not purchased something by now, give them a look see.  Like BAT, you can actually have a conversation with Kenwa, the owner and designer.

I have a vintage MSB Platinum Link DAC from the turn of the century. The frequency display went out and MSB is refurbishing it back to like new. It has two upgraded R2R ladders, one in each balanced output channel because I use single ended triode preamplification and amplification which I prefer. It has a buffer to eliminate jitter and it can upsample to 384 kHz with 24 bit depth. I found it sounds best with my Vault 2i from which I downloaded some 14/96 recordings of symphonies I added to all my ripped CDs when I do not up-sample.
I think you might like a used MSB DAC with the R2R ladder. It has many things newer ladder DACs do not have.

Delta sigma is definitely not the only reference game in town anymore.

It never was in my opinion.
Just had to be use because of sacd/dsd.
It was second rate for doing red book PCM 16/44, 24/96 or DXD conversion.

Cheers George

i am glad the mod cleaned up the garbage in this thread

@decooney 

you mentioned using outboard power supplies with the mhdt dacs... i have three of them, they all have the standard IEC 3 prong plug for power input on the rear panels...

how do you use an outboard PS?

@jjss49
I don’t myself, not yet. However, following up with a friend this morning who’s messing with two different psu units for both his streamer and his dac, the psu is not going to work as hoped for the dac itself. Also validated a few others in the group loop had not gotten it to work on theirs either, not without tearing the whole dac apart. Stopped there...  So I was partly mistaken on this part. Apologize for the premature mis-info. Seemed like a good idea at first. If the psu works in other areas I might order the same and at least try it on my own streamer, and then proceed with possibly piecing together a new streamer myself and use the same psu if it makes a difference. My tube preamp uses a similar large outboard power supply unit, would like to do the same for the DAC.  Nothing confirmed on my end yet on my own system though. Maybe this winter, after the streamer stuff...