There are so many hidden treasures from the 1980s / 90s. A handful of years ago, I saw a great deal on a CAL Alpha DAC and had to go for it. And what a find indeed! This is the kind of thing you read about finding at a garage sale or thrift store that you take home and it just knocks your socks off.
The Alpha has been a great match with a $300 4wpc integrated tube amp and budget bookshelf speakers to build this vintage system connected to a desktop computer system. I use the computer's audio board's TOSLINK output to the Alpha but it also has RCA SPDIF, ATT glass and AES/EBU inputs.
The Alpha was pretty good with the Sovtek tubes, but a pair of 1960s Telefunken 12AX7's was quite a refinement in smoothness. Throwing in some spare $$$$ power cables and ICs lying around provided another revelation. If such cables can be justified in a $20k DAC, why not try them in the Alpha?
Due to the speakers' and amp's limitations, I can't fairly evaluate the Alpha's frequency extremes capabilities, but the Alpha and the budget amp bring on a level of musicality that I have heard many 5-figure systems fail miserably. I have been wanting to try this against the Lampi B6 DAC in my main system but it's such a pain to tear systems down and move around components......so maybe one of these days.
One final note: I was surprised to see no ventilation atop the unit's chassis. Even though the unit barely gets warm, I had a friend with a drill press drill a couple rows of 1/8" holes above the tube pair.
