An antiquated DAC or an affordable recent one?

I've owned some older Audio Alchemy dacs, some decent CD players, and a CAL Alpha DAC which was one of my better hifi purchases some time ago. A while back I started out looking for a cheap DAC to connect my cable box and DVD player to in a 2.1 system used mostly for music. What I ended up with was a Channel Islands Audio VDA 2 DAC. What was going to be an auxilary digital source ended up being my main source. For $599 this dac is awesome. I don't know how digital can sound any better without spending three or four times as much. I had listened to the Benchmark dac several times and preferred the VDA 2's sound and simplicity. There are only two switches, a quality chipset, and discrete output. Nothing against the DAC 1 it's nice, but I wouldn't use it for anything other than a DAC so I thought I'd be paying for stuff I wouldn't use.

IMO you should go with a new UPsampling dac like the Dacmagic or the V-Dac.They will turn a cheap transport into a redbook player that will compete with the others out there below $2000.00 anyway.Read Stereophile two monbths back they did a review of the V-Dac and the Dacmagic. I have never heard anything that comes close to my Dacmagic and Musical concepts transport.No I have never heard any players over $3000.00 so I cannot say about them.

Here's my little bit. I have an older Micromega DAC 1 and installed the Burson Audio opamps. Totally changed the sound and very pleasantly surprised.

Sorry, was too quick to post. So, another option is to take an older DAC and mod it.