Mark Levinson 36 dac or Theta Gen V Best?

The No. 36 and No. 36S only decode up to 20 Bit resolution. You cannot run 24 bit streams into the unit. It will not lock onto the signal. You need to consider a used No. 360 or 360S in order to decode 24 Bit/96Hz music files, which a great majority of the hi-res downloads are. These DAC's are old and I'm not sure the No. 360 will lock onto 24 bit signals that sample beyond 96 Hz such as 176K and 192K

The ML 36 has one big weak spot: digital jitter. However, if you put a Monarchy Audio DIP with a good digital cable in front of the 36, you will get 360S like performance. I've had several modern DACs of up to $3000 in my system, and it hasn't been beaten so far.

You will get an improvement if you if you go for the Bricasti or the Ref variant of the BelCanto 3.5mkii, but then we are talking > $6000...

I compared the Theta DS Pro Gen VA DAC and the Mark Levinson No 38 CD Player/DAC and the Theta was slightly better than the DAC portion of the No 38 player. The Theta DAC is an outstanding DAC. Don't get me wrong, the Levinson is outstanding also, but I liked the Theta over the No. 38 and the No. 38's DAC is a two level upgrade over the No. 36. The thing I really liked about the Mark Levinson CD Player DAC was that it had optical, Balanced and standard digital inputs. so you could use it as a DAC only. The only problem with the Theta was that the one I had did not have optical input, nor balanced. Just BNC, RCA. So depending on what inputs you desire, I would grab the Theta first, (unless optical or balanced inputs are important to you) and the Mark Levinson No. 38 second.

Also, the 380s is an upgrade to the 38 and is better. The transport in the 38/380s is very very good.

So, places still have the upgrade board for the 36 to upgrade them to the 38. I couldn't find any upgrade boards to upgrade the 38 to 380s.

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