dCS Bartok Apex vs McIntosh DA2 - Trouble Hearing the Difference

@ripordaff

I love your room. Do you allow people to bring red wine into this room?

I like amplifiers from McIntosh but don’t like any of their processors. They don’t like selling tube line stages without phono stage for some reason. They cram so much stuff into these processors and integrated components. You don’t know what you’re getting..

If you’re playing around with an expensive Bartok component I would consider getting a nice line stage preamp to use within your system. And then you can do all kinds of component comparisons without worrying about contamination from some crazy integrated processor. I use an av processor from nad with a line stage added on top of it for 2 Channel listening.

Also the streamer being used may not be the greatest in the scheme of things and I saw a comment up top it could be a serious bottleneck basically negating anything of quality that gets involved with it. Although streamer may be perfectly great I don’t know. I use a lumin X 1 streamer dac which I find ideal because I hate dealing with separate dacs all the connectivity issues that goes along with it.  lumin does a great job incorporating these things together and it's got a separate power box which always is a turn on

@audphile1 

Interesting observation! My DA2 is in my C2700. I also have an Aries Cerat Helene DAC in the mix. The AC is leaps and bounds better than the DA2, but I wouldn't have sought much more if I had never heard the AC in the system. I know this sounds paradoxical, but the DA2 is just that good!

@jastralfu 

here’s a link that gives some insight into the testing regime at HiFi News:

PM bio

@mdalton thats certainly an impressive resume. I don’t discount his findings I just don’t know how to reconcile his measurements with the specs from McIntosh. They might not be the same thing. I certainly don’t have the background nor have I read enough on my own to know any differences.  Thanks for the link though it was an interesting read.  And sorry OP for hijacking your thread.

@jastralfu 

pretty sure my theory is right (it’s the DAC spec).  look at Mcintosh-provided specs on MA252, which doesn’t have a DAC.  There, for “SNR -Power Amp Input” they show an “N/A”.  Regardless, you don’t really need - or want - to reconcile the two.  As i said, a reliable 3rd party allows you to compare across brands, and is probably more likely to be accurate, for obvious reasons.