DAC's from the past, are any of them really worth much today?

There has been a lot of progress in making DACs sound much better in the last ten or fifteen years. Like all audiophile gear, really high end gear stays relevant much longer than the lower level stuff.

Given the equipment you own, you should probably be looking at contemporary equipment (say less than 6 years old). Like all things, in general, the better quality the better it will sound as long as you buy one in the “sound camp” you are in… if you are a natural / musical camp you don’t want to buy a Benchmark, if you are in the details means everything, then you don’t want to buy Audio Research. You want natural presentation and great detail, then think Berkeley Reference Alpha.

I can’t think of why anyone interested in high end audio would want to have anything to do with USB. It was brought on board because of the PC. No high end system should have a computer in the loop… hence no use for it.

Ric Schultz's original DACs were quite good and for the pittance one pays for one today, they are a steal.  I paid $100 for one used and it would easily compete with a $700-1,000 DAC today.

I think the first ones were simply DAC 1 and DAC 2.

This may help.  http://tweakaudio.com/EVS-2/Company_Info.html

I agree that some very good modern dacs are available for under $1k, but I totally disagree that the modern dacs are necessarily better than the best dacs of the past. The Naim 555 and CDS3, the Vekian, Wadia, Zanden were incredible. As far as “new technology”, many of the hot dacs today are using the oldest dac technology- resistor ladder and old R2R chips. That said, buying older digital products may not be a good idea from a repairability standpoint. I know Naim supports its old products, but good luck with much else. And anything with a transport is very risky as well.

@soix 

+1

the ok’d ines still have a limited useful life with optical input functionality out of the TV panel in my 2.1 TV “B” system.