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Denafrips Terminator vs other dacs

Hey everyone I have owned the denafrips Terminator in my system for approximately one year and am enjoying it. However I have not compared it to many other Dacs. the only one really being the Burson conductor SL 9018 and the hdv 820 and both of these were with headphones not speakers.
Initially when I was buying I was looking to spend around 4,000 and was deciding between the PS audio directstream and the Terminator and after lots of reading eventually settled on The Terminator.

So in this thread my aim is to get all the people who've either owned the Terminator or heard it to chime in on there impressions of it specifically compared to other dacs. Some of the other dacs I'm thinking of are the chord Hugo 2, tt2, Dave. The bricasti M1 SE. PS direct stream. Metrum pavane. Holo spring l3. And any other dacs that you heard that you have compared to the Terminator.

I realize that there are other threads that discuss the Terminator but I have not seen any that focus on comparing it to other dacs which is what I want this thread to be focused on.
Thank you so much.
smodtactical
shkong78's avatar
shkong78
1,485 posts
 
@thyname

If you give more detailed experience of  MSB Discrete DAC, it will help a lot.

With basic price under 10K, it is a very interesting product.

Thomas
thyname's avatar
thyname
3,107 posts
 
@smodractical base price of the Discrete DAC starts just under $10K. Not sure how you came up with ten times that
hgeifman
2,295 posts
 
As noted above, the MBS Discrete DAC is priced at $9,950 and this includes one external power supply. The recommended optional 2nd power supply is priced at $1,450. The DAC comes equipped with a single power supply, but can be augmented with a second discrete power supply to enable optimized power isolation between all major components.  One power supply is for the laddered DAC section and the 2nd power supply is for the analog section.

Another option is the T+A DAC 8 DSD priced at $4,400.  Audiotroy recommended it in one of the above posts. 



smodtactical OP
982 posts
 
@thyname sorry I thought you were talking about Select dac.

For discrete dac wouldn't people necessarily recommend the separate power base? In which case it would be $20k. 

Without the power base is the discrete dac better than all other options in his price category?
thyname's avatar
thyname
3,107 posts
 
No @smodtactical --- the second power supply is less than $1,500. It already comes with one. if you add (let's say) the Renderer module for Ethernet streaming, it will add another $1995 to the price. So about $13K to $14K tops MSRP give or take. 

There is obviously the power base, for those who want it, but I did not get it. For me and my budget, the dual discrete power supplies are good enough
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