T+A DAC 200 or WEISS 501

with no exaggeration, i have tried (in my own system) some50 dacs since early 2020 (ranging from a few hundred $ to many thousand $)

the weiss 501 is one (of a handful) i have kept, i value its very rich feature set, its small footprint, and its spacious, precise, energetic ’straight wire with gain’ nature of sound... yes, poor recordings will sound poor, there is little in the way of ’masking’ -- i do have other dacs that nicely color the sound, one way or another, but the weiss for me is truly a ’reference’ unit - i recently upgraded to the latest version ’4 ch’ with updated processor chip

i have not tried the t&a

take away from this input what you will

@jjss49 what exactly did you liked so much about the 501 can you please highlight to understand if your preference meets mine

the features, the sound, the small footprint

i am sure you are aware of the manifold features of the 501, so i won’t bother repeating them ad nauseum here

https://twitteringmachines.com/weiss-dac501-beauty-with-brains/ -- m lavorna is an excellent writer, great ears too, covers the needed ground here

I believe one of the dealers on this forum has a demo Weiss unit that can be tested out at home.

@jasbirnandra , Like you I have to go blind - at least for now. And based on the information I gathered, I would go with the T+A DAC 200, if these were the only 2 DACs. For me the reasons are completely different. The primary being that the T+A can do DSD, while the Weiss cannot. I don't want to go into the discussion of PCM Vs DSD because that is not relevant here. But all my FLAC files are converted to 512 DSD before playback through the current DAC. Hence the T+A. TBH, I would be content even with the older T+A DAC 8 DSD, which is not made anymore. But they are hard to come by on used market since they are coveted for their DSD playback.