Benchmark Dac3

@dlcockrum / @shadorne 

I sincerely appreciate your candid feedback. At face value, Dave's point regarding digital sound being somewhat tied to solid state, which conceivably could be eliminated with tubes likely has validity. I'm biased toward the Schiit Yggdrasil, however, as it costs *less* than some of the other options and is R2R multibit, and is specifically oriented to LPCM. I'm reading so many positive things about multibit R2R versus delta sigma.

Here is something that will interest the group. I posed the question (Schiit vs DAC3) to a Benchmark sales rep. The following is his response. And I do give credit and value the fact that a Benchmark sales rep took the time to speak with me and respond in writing. 

"I’ve forwarded your email to engineering in hopes that they will comment. I can tell you that looking at the specs, the noise floor is higher on the Schiit model. With a low noise floor, as in the DAC3, low level details in the music and reverb tails don’t get lost. We want the SNR to be better than the maximum dynamic range of the music, which with 24 bit, while theory would be 144dB, reality is 122dB. Our SNR of the DAC3 is 128dB. The other thing that I notice not mentioned is inter-sample overs. This is a huge problem as most of the recordings we listen to are 16/44. Our DAC sounds detailed, yet smooth, transparent."

All recent DACs do not sound the same for sure, however, there are many very excellent sounding ones these days for not very much to the point where in many cases any quality device with a DAC is no longer likely to be the weakest link in the playback chain. Not so much the case just a few years back. DAC technology appears to have mostly matured in recent years I would say  and very good ones can be found even in very small devices like newer smart phones for example.  Bad news for "high end audio" unfortunately.

@mapman 

To your point, I'm told that the end resulting sound is much more than the DAC itself. Case in point, I mentioned to the Benchmark sales rep that the DAC3 has a "Sabre ES9028PRO" DAC while my Oppo UDP-205 has the more advanced "Sabre ES9038PRO" DAC. He immediately dismissed that as essentially being irrelevant and steered the conversation towards the rest of the electronics, citing how they (Benchmark) have implemented the DAC and are getting the most out of it given the rest of their circuitry.

I have no doubt both BEnchmark and Oppo make excellent sounding DAC products.

Chord DACs are interesting to compare to others like BEnchmark and Oppo in terms of technical approach.

If you trust measurements then Benchmark is outstanding compared to anything else.

If you trust ears then your taste is what matters and no amount of research can help as you need to audition....

That said, I am definitely hearing the lower noise floor with the DAC3 and it is truly remarkable to my ears. I honestly did not think I could hear the difference between a typical high end 110 db noise floor and the 128db of the DAC3 - so what I am hearing goes against my expectation bias.