Question About DACs

Wow ... those are some really troubling measurements on the Yggy. Glad I didn’t pull the trigger on either the Gumby or the Bitfrost. I will continue my research. Thanks.

My Peachtree Nova 300 has an amazing built in DAC that puts my 10yr old outboard to shame. Sounds like tubes with punch

++freedivers point. The difference an expensive dac makes is a bit overhyped for many people’s systems. I would review your overall system and be sure this is where you want to put your money. A lot of people would benefit more from investing the cost of a 2500 schiit yaggy in another part of their rig and going with a sub 500 dac like a dragonfly, halide or the cheaper schiit. Lots of decent options used as well in the lower price bracket. I have a 

You get what you pay for. I would only go for a FPGA dac. The 2 ps audio DS dacs are fpga based and have network cards built in so you don’t have to use the inferior usb connection and your music server/pc/Mac can be in a different room. Also, read the reviews for the psa DS dacs. You will notice each 6 months when the firmware gets updated for free, the SQ goes up and the dac is highly rated before each update. Most other dacs can’t do this. Most dacs can’t be updated to support MQA whereas the DS dacs did get a free update to support MQA a year ago

I couldn't see what the rest of your system is. I would not trust measurements very much for dacs, there are very good sounding dacs that don't measure that well and dacs with good measurements that don't seem to sound that well.

Try to find a dac with good reviews in the price bracket you are comfortable with. The Chord Mojo or the iFi Micro iDSD BL are for example probably better than your old cd player.

When I bought a better dac years ago it sounded better than my old (cheap) cdp even though I had a modest system. It is hard to say if that was the best upgrade I could do for the money.