Msb dacs why not alot of postings

in any product development there are two important frontiers

1 - at any cost, advance performance, define state of the art
2 - bring excellent performance to more users at a price many users can easily afford

for those of us who enjoy this hobby, we also want to know the absolute performance gap between 1 and 2, then we calibrate and decide what we want to buy on the value vs performance curve

for me personally - i cannot and do not speak for anyone else - i think 1500-2000 bucks for a dac is a sweet spot - really excellent sound can be gotten, rivaling excellent analog systems (which i also fortunate to have) - i have tried many dacs now, some quite expensive ones well above this price tier, thus the basis for my belief

i could spend 10x that amount, affordability is not an issue, but for me, i would rather save the money, spend it on something else, and/or give to charities i support - no we can’t take the money with us when we pass, but even so, i would rather use the money for other things to improve my life and other peoples lives in ways that have more meaning and impact

@lalitk,

The LinQ has no interface, you simply turn it on and it acquires and IP address and is available as a Roon device ready to stream. As you probably already know, it has modular "cards" if you will with ROON, DLNA and HQPlayer currently supported. So if you only have the ROON card, yes you need to subscribe to ROON to connect and stream through it. I will tell you that it's quite revealing and I found that the design is very sensitive to footers, as much if not more so than my amps. Compared to the streamer boxes and gadgets (Sonores, SOTMs with LPSUs) the LinQ is simply in another league.  
 

@lalitk Please do post a review thread if you do try the LinQ. I'm interested in trying some new streamers too.

@sbonamo,

Thank you for the clarification. I can only hope LinQ surpasses my current reference, Aurender N10 :-)

@cal3713, 

You bet. I've sent an email to my dealer and let's see how soon I can have one for comparison. 

I purchased an MSB Platinum DAC early in the first decade of this century when I had the income to do it. Because I prefer single ended triode amplifiers using AM radio station transmitter tubes so I don't have to use highly sensitive speakers I bought their first upgrade, two R2R ladders with more precise resistors in them rather than all four for balanced output. I had them put in an up-sampler to 384 kHz but I find the new downloads at 24/96 onto a computer storage USB plugged into the back of a Bluesound Vault 2i makes a more noticeable image focus without the up-sampling. I had a buffer that reloads the bits and puts them out with almost all jitter eliminated. I have not heard other high priced DACs and mine was expensive after all the upgrades. The years passed and I did not know how good it can sound till I had some 24/96 recordings I play in their native rate.
All of you are correct about the prices of what they sell skyrocketing to something only a television evangelist could afford. As income declined for most people and prices went up I could never afford anything like that again. Eventually I could not even afford parts to build my own tube amps and  preamps, the last thing I did was to upgrade the series wired electrolytic filter capacitors in the 1000 Volt power supply with polypropylene capacitors good for 2200 Volts because electrolytic capacitors have a limited life expectancy and more DC resistance than polypropylene and this is where the MSB difference became more conspicuous. Recently the frequency display counter went out on my MSB Platinum and to the credit of MSB, they repair such a model which has not been made in so many years.