Are "vintage" DAC's worthwhile, or is this a tech that does not age well

I had a CAL Audio Labs DAC and Pioneer Elite DAC/DVD player from the early 2000s that I was using for years.  When I decided to upgrade to modern DACs in the $500-1000 range a year or two ago, the differences (improvements) were noticeable.  I now use even more expensive DACs, one a modern design and one in production today but based on a vintage R2R chip.  Both exceed the $1000 DACs in sound quality.  Lessons learned: (1) not all DACs sound the same.  (2) vintage DACs, properly implemented, can sound great.  With respect to (2), I suspect we've learned a lot about handling digital signals in the past years, making older implementations more suspect.

On the digital front, who knows? But the analog conversion and the analog amp do make a difference. Very rare to have a good sounding cheap amp. 

Very rare to have a good sounding cheap amp.

Call me i will give to you a list of cheap very good amplifiers....my sansui AU 7700 is unbeattable for the price: 100 bucks and 6th year of working in my room 12 hours each day....

Try to look for a very good and low cost dac? This is HARD, good luck..... 😁




I bought a NOS french dac which use only one old chip TDA 1543 in a minimalistic design... Sold on EBAY by Starting point systems...Christophe Mariac designer...

He is so good i want to buy another one used in case...If someone want to sell one call me.... 😊😁😁😁😁😊

I will bother no much ever for a dac, because in my actual acoustical settings i sense NO limitation at all coming fromt it...

And my audio system for his price is so well embedded that i dont listen to my 7 headphones anymore, i dont like NO other system i listen to more andi dont to want to upgrade or buy another one....

It is not the best system there is at all, but when all music is there filling the room without heavy limitations, we listen music without thinking about a new component....

Then my greatest purchase luck what the luck to buy one of this dac....

A good dac at LOW price is perhaps the harder piece of gear to discover and bought....harder than even buying low price good speakers....

I am born under a good star.....


Then yes, old designed cheap could be more good or than dreamed of because most people has never listened to their own system at his peak working potential at all anyway.... Often the real causes of theor unsatifactions unbeknownst to them, comes from the bad embeddings controls and less than from the gear they already own.... Then instead of adressing the more complicated questions like vibrations controls, electrical noise floor controls or more importantly acoustical controls, they search for an easy solution: an upgrade....And the more evident one : a costly DAC....


I think it is not the vintage chip TDA 1543 which only explain the result i listen to but more the MINIMALISTIC way and  the low noise which is associated also with the internal battery....I connect it to a good power supply also: IPOWER ...

Older DACs will still sound as good (or bad) as they were originally, but there have been significant advances in DAC implementations. So I would recommend at least listening to some newer DACs before deciding to go with an older one.

To this day, the Audio Note Level 5 Special is a state of the art, sought after DAC. MSRP in 2008 was $80K! It can only be used to play Redbook and SACD only having a SPDIF input. I feel fortunate to own and enjoy a 3 Dimension Audio DAC which was inspired by the AN 5. Like it, a fully tube DAC. It is in my office headphone system with a Theta Compli transport, Bakoon HA-1 and ZMF Verites. I listen to it daily and feel, “Wow, that sounds great”. But when I listen to my TT main system I feel, Wow, I am speechless”
Not to open up that Pandora’s box...
As far as aging digital, for sure 16/44 is not going away and still sounds great!