Need DAC suggestion

Yeah, I though the Bifrost was a joke at first because of the name and it sounded too good to be true for the money. Of course I'll have to wait and see how it sounds, but on paper it looks good. No upsampling and 24/192 usb support with no mac drivers required. They are supposed to release two more dacs in the near future with balanced outputs, etc. Made in the US and 15 day return policy is comforting.

I dug around a little bit and found this recommendation for a USB -> SPDIF converter, Kingrex UC192,

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=92537.0

This is probably a more correct approach, since coax or optical digital is a stable long-term format whilst USB is hardly that. If you must use USB, that's one way to do it without severely curtailing your DAC options.

I now I keep trying to steer you away from USB. But I have my reasons! None of which put a dollar in my pocket. :)

I think "classic" audio companies have not gone after this feature for many reasons, so when you insist on that kind of connectivity then you are discarding some truly excellent DACs. There, that's all the steering I'm going to do for today. Good luck!

Audiogon and its http policies...

www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=92537.0

is the reference in question.

Although the Dacmagic has been around for a while, the various inputs, filtering options, outputs including balanced (which I use), and sound seem to keep it among the best values in audio. I recently compared it to another few DACs at an informal audio geek gathering. We had my Dacmagic, a w4s dac2, a Rega, and a music hall...none seemed to be obviously better than my Dacmagic...we also tried some power suppply swapping...no difference was detected and we were trying really hard to hear differences...the good news is that all these dacs sounded great, but the Dacmagic was the least expensive (especially used) and had more features.

I think the Dacmagic is the best you can find for the price.