DAC for Olive musica

The point of the transport on the Olive is to make a copy of your CD onto the hard drive, not to play CDs directly from the transport. Using hard drive, in theory, is much better than a CD transport in terms of noise. HD proponents claim that it is better than any CD transport out there, no matter the cost. For us that's the most important aspect of HD based music servers, besides the unbridled convenience of accessing all of your CD collection in a matter of seconds. Long as your DAC has a USB connection, you can play directly from the HD. "That's all I have to say about that." - Forest Gump.

The Olive units use a rca type dig. out connector so any dac can be used! The usb connections (2) are for adding outboard HD's...

I run my Olive Opus 3 aka musica through a tube audio designs TADAC and love the sound. It sounds better than my current audiphile grade CD player.

The olive has seperate analog RCA L & R outputs and also seperate pure digital outputs using optical and coaxial connections. A new Opus 4 is coming out. The old Opus 3 and Musica had a decent dac in them and the benefit of being able to back up your music on a hard drive.

Most DACS can be used with it. Just be sure the DAC handles the format that you put on the disk, as the output is pure digital and not converted back from how it is stored.