Jeff Rowlands Amp and Dac vs. VAC amp and DAC

Yes wires worth that amount should trounce anything from Mogami. No way to know unless you try.        You could end up better financially by spending less on wires and investing that money elsewhere in your system down the road if needed.  

Its pretty senseless in my mind to drop a fortune on something based on retail price without any real basis for comparing its performance to other more affordable high quality options. 

We are headed in the wrong direction, I think. Whatever we say Rinpoche appears to return to one brand - Audioquest. Who can say why? Anyway, $6000 buys great used tube preamp, be it VAC or Lamm or something else. Or new Herron, as an example. No cable in any system is worth that much money until the system is complete. This one is not. Of course, if someone just must do it it's not really our business, but I certainly wouldn't be able to applaud it.

I can barely differentiate Vedic Sanskrit from Middle Persian, but one thing I am sure of. From slightly different perspectives four brands have been recommended to try first - Mogami, Purist Audio, Wireworld and Shunayata. Chances are that at least one of them would work really well, or perhaps all of them giving a little different presentations.

I agree completely with the foregoing comments.  While I perhaps worded my Porsche/Odin comment more subtly than I should have, my main point (in addition to providing a bit of perspective on the cost of some of the cables that have been mentioned) was that I would not expect the proposed trade to have much likelihood of being sufficiently transformative to make sense.  And I would expect that likelihood to be even lower in this case than in many other circumstances as a result of the technical characteristics of the components that are being connected, as I indicated earlier, and by the short length that is involved.

An approach that stands a much greater chance of being sonically rewarding, IMO, would be to sell the Devialet 200 integrated amp (which the last time I looked had a list price in the USA of just under $10K), and applying the proceeds to or toward the combination of a preamp and much less expensive cables.

Just my $0.02.  Best regards,
-- Al
 

There might be a few things that complicate the matter.
Rinpoche is a professor. It is hard to be a student when you are a professor. She is a student here. Listening to advices is one thing, following them is something completely different.
I also believe that she doesn't want to deal with private sales, dealers are probably okay, so there may be a problem of selling that Deviolet amp. She might not have Audiogon feedback either. Selling something like that with zero feedback would be very difficult even at lower price.
She might not want to buy used, especially privately. Some people, more often women, don't buy anything used including houses and cars. Used is used, you know, it belonged to someone else, and in a sense still does.
But really, Rinpoche, there are Mogami studio XLR 1 meter pair cables on Audiogon. $95. You would do us all a favour to get them. Yes, I don't believe this will be enough, but I may be wrong. Please. $95.