Least expensive discrete resistor ladder NOS DAC?

OMG what a cool and esoteric niche oriented world we live in......

nitewulf
The Schiit and Soekris dacs aren’t NOS dacs, they are r2r but oversampling.

I know the Schiit isn’t NOS, but from what this seems to say, the Soekris has many user sellectable filters, and NOS mode is just but one of them.


Soekris Filters:

"The Soekris filters are the result of experimentation and evaluation-by-ear. In some cases, the “best sounding -or most likeable” filters are NOS or near NOS which measure the worse. Manufacturers filters are “short” vs longer filters in the Soekris DAC. This allows more experimentation and fine-tuning. As an example, the Soekris DAC filters can have up 1016 coefficients in FIR1 and up to 120 coefficients in FIR2."
"1021filtNewNOS NOS (Since there can only be one NOS filter, this is the only one to use)Latest iteration of the NOS filter which includes POS’s improved de-emphasis filter.”The NOS filter does not actually filter at all – all the coefficients are set to 1 so the audio is passed unaltered and is only up-sampled. The side effect is none of the mirror images of the original signal that appear in the up sampled signal are removed…””Listened to NQtb65, NQtb70 (see Nyquist filters below) and NewNOS today. All three are pretty nice. But NewNOS feels distinctively more dynamic, direct and more full-bodied…”

All Soekris user adjustable filters.
https://hifiduino.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/digital-filters-for-soekris-r-2r-dac/

Cheers George

More Soekris filters here, including the "near NOS" one as well.

https://hifiduino.wordpress.com/2015/06/27/r2r-dac-benchmark-filters-for-now/

Cheers George

There's a nice Metrum Hex DAC for sale here now at $1800.  Best of luck. 

I'd also definitely look into the new Metrum Onyx, it may be a bit above budget but Metrums are very high quality, and the new dacs use all new r2r fpga modules.