Upgrade DAC or Buy New

There is nothing wrong with an older dac. Zanden uses a dac chip from the late 80's early 90's in their $10k+ signature dac. Tubes are not new technology. If you like what you have and feel you need more drive to your amp than maybe a good used preamp might help. It would be a shame to upgrade your dac and then miss the magic you are now enjoying. I went down that road years ago and it took me years to get back to where I was.

I don't know about the particular units you are talking about, but it is wrong to assume that more recently designed DACs are superior to older models. All manufacturers are dependent on the chips that are available on the market. New generation of chips are often inferior in sound quality to older chips. The new chips serve more functions than the older chips or better serve other priorities. For example, new chips are optimized for much lower power consumption so that they can be used in portable devices; who really cares about sound quality? Some manufacturers have actually stocked up on vintage chips to use in their premium models (e.g., Naim).

Nickt: Thanks; I'll keep that in mind.

Stereo: I'm already using a preamp in the form of a Tact 2.2 XP. The Tact has an internal DAC that can be used to feed power amps directly, or I can feed an outboard DAC using its digital outputs. I'm also using the Tacts built in digital crossover, so I have to use the Tact volume control. I suppose I can connect a preamp in the chain before the main speaker power amps, but I would have to set the volume of the preamp at some fixed level since I am using the Tacts volume control. I would prefer not to do that however, and use a DAC that has a high enough output level.

Larryi: Yeah, I think that it what I'm realizing. I find it interesting that my 10 year old DAC (using the discontinued Burr Brown 1704 chips) sounds better to me than the much newer DAC (using AKM chips) built into the Tact unit.

Smeyers,

My CD player, a Naim CD555, is a current, in-production model. It uses "vintage" 1704 chips. I don't know what the current price of this player (the dollar is dropping oh so fast), but last I looked it had a retail price around $30k; that is a pretty strong endorsement for this chip. I think I read somewhere that Charles Hansen of Ayre is a big admirer of this chip, even though he cannot get this chip for his own production.

Larryi,

Interesting; I just found out that Esoteric also uses them in their $14k X-01 CD Player. As I also mentioned earlier, Empirical uses them in their Spoiler DAC; this is a quote from their site: "PCM1704U-K D/A chips - some of the best-sounding D/A chips ever produced".

Interesting... It makes me think about keeping the DAC I have, but I would need an active preamp after the DAC, since the output voltage is too low. Do you know if a simple active line stage is sold for this purpose? I only need a single input and single output (probably with the ability to adjust output gain).