Which component to upgrade 1st ?

@milo0812

Border Patrol DAC is sold with a 14-days return policy, no restocking fee. Unfortunately, MHDT DAC carries a 10% restocking fee. I would defer to @hilde45 sane (no BS) advise on MHDT Orchid DAC as his setup include both Node 2 and Orchid.

It’s all about synergy, sometimes it takes few auditions with multiple components to find that perfect blend within the context of your system. And please don’t go on changing everything at once, bringing in a DAC, live with it and then plan your next move. In this hobby, decisions made in haste can cost you a pretty penny :-)

@jasonbourne52 A change of speakers will always have a greater positive effect than any electronics. Check out Devore!

Garbage-in = Garbage-out. Everything matters, not just speakers,

if you care about how it sounds.

@lalitk 

Good suggestion on Node mods. I am curious if you have auditioned and compared any of the offerings from Lumin or Aurender with your modified Node.

I have not. I'd like to. From what I have heard, especially from very experienced people like @jjss49 and others in my area is that the incremental change of a streamer with a good, quiet power supply and a good DAC (I love my Orchid) is very minor. I am holding off on spending thousands more on my streamer but I would love to compare.

@decooney +100. Yes, speakers just amplify unresolved problems up the chain.

@hilde45

I can’t speak for anyone else but in my system, the audible difference between a BS Vault and Aurender N100 were far from subtle. I won’t pity BS Node or Vault against Aurender N20 or W20SE cause that wouldn’t be a fair comparison. One important distinction during these comparisons, I always used a very high quality DAC. So I can only recommend an audition in your system to find out :-)

+100. Yes, speakers just amplify unresolved problems up the chain.

Yes, this is my rationale for suggesting getting the front end of the signal path improved as the initial move/action. I get the popular heavy focus on the speakers.

However, the better the quality of speakers , the more they simply faithfully amplify the signal (Quality) fed to them.

Charles