Transport for Bel Canto DAC2

Clio...I posted the link to Steve's SPDIF article in Positive Feedback above...

Your Bel Canto ought to be taking care of most of the errors any transport might be sending it but I guess it's possible a really bad transport might be screwing things up.

In your price range a reasonable thing to try would be to find a good used Denon 29xx-series DVD player and try it in place of the Toshiba you now have.

I've got both a 2200 and a 2910 and both sound great with my Benchmark DAC. They're pretty well built and the ergonomics are very good. I bought the 2200 used but in mint condition for $200 and the 2910 new for $435. If they don't solve the problem they're not tough to resell or you can use them as excellent DVD players. They'd give you a chance to play around with SACD and DVD Audio, too, if that's of any interest.

I used my DAC2 with Sony S7700. As Phil suggested, this dvd player is an excellent transport and works extremely well with DAC2. But, S7700 will/may play 95% of CD-Rs, but not absolutely all of them.

Suggestion about digital COAX cable being 1.5m in length is good too, but honestly, it all depends on the cable.

I have experimented with at least 8 different digital cables. DAC2 responds well to better digital cables.

This brings me to what I wanted to recommend to you, and that is, keep your current transport and instead get yourself an awesome digital cable, such as Virtual Dynamics NiteII. You can buy it for around $400 demo or used well under $400). I am certain this cable will make more difference with this particular dac than a $400 transport, be it used or new one. The best thing to do is to try. So, if you can borrow someone's cd player or transport to try with the DAC2 with your current digital cable, do that and see how much difference there is. I am willing to bet, unless there is something seriously wrong with your dvd player, that any transport under $400 will not produce that much difference, again, with this dac.

Call cable company and borrow VD NiteII. You want smooth sound, deep bass and excellent imaging with Bel Canto DAC2, the NiteII cable is all that. This was the best digital cable(under $1000) I've tried in my system.

The NAD C541i (and its successor) the 542 has a number of good things going for it:

- It's in your price range, esp. used ;^)
- It plays CD-R and CD-RW no sweat.
- NAD's Redbook error correction is a complete implementation of the spec.
- These players decode HDCD correctly to their analog outputs.

To my ears, HDCD sounds better properly decoded by the C541i than through the DAC2, though it's different and you lose some soundstage. So I happily switch back and forth depending on the disk. One thing for sure is I'm not hearing error artifacts.

hard drive is dead quiet. I am very pleased.