Mark Levinson n°39 or dedicated DAC?

I don't understand why you would want 90's era digital technology in 2011. Without putting a price tag to the Levinson 39 to match up to current DACS... this is a theoretical debate... (I don't know of any blanket advice on choosing between old digital gear and the new digital pieces in)

When you compare the sound quality difference between 90's era digital technology and 2010 technology with different output stages, power supplies, reliability strictly by reputation... you are forced to compare the dollar values you assign to each piece. That's tough unless you do a lot of this kind of thing or one piece is completely undervalued. It does not sound like you are going to be buying and selling lots of equipment as part of the hobby.

I would think a modern DAC would allow you to use high resolution formats and choosing a DAC that does this with files stored on your server would eliminate a 90's era DAC.

The other important question is,"would the rest of my system be resolving enough to distinguish a difference".

Get a standalone DAC that is up to date and does up to 24 bit/192 kHz sampling rate...preferably a DAC that allows you listen to the source's native bit depth and sampling rate w/o upsampling/dithering as default. I love the PS Audio Perfect Wav DAC for this very reason. 16 bit sounds best played back 16 bit. 24 bit sounds best played back 24 bit. The Perfect Wav does this great for $3K price tag and I'm sure you could find a lightly used one in the $2k price range. It's a hard DAC to beat for the price, imo given the fact you don't have to upsample like most of the other entry level dacs these days.

I'm not trading in my Levinson 360s anytime soon, even if it is 90's technology - LOL. It's almost vinyl like in its rendering and handles 24/96... Using one of the many bridge products out there I feed digital from my Mac MIni into the Levinson and couldn't be happier. Are there better dac's out there; sure but you're talking a big jump in class and cost (i.e. Weiss, dCSs, Berkeley, AMD, etc.).

Personally if the price is right I’d go for the Levinson 39.

Greetings,
I have a ML39 and it sounds pretty good to my ears. got some GREAT reviews when it came out. I gave up on ML when my beloved ML20.6's died and could not be repaired, they were at the Service Bench for 14 months and they could not fix the problem. The ML39 is the only ML gear in my system now, I went for a different pre-amp and amp.
If they do need service? The Service Bench is a cetified ML repair center. They can service most all of the ML gear except for ML amps like the 20.6's (ML/Harmon Kardon are really a bunch of jerks (IMO) for not servicing their gear.
A new high end player 2011 would probably be the best way to go.
With some great music servers out there today I'm not sure if a CD player is the way to go anymore. When my ML39 dies I will probably go with a server, I might get one sooner.
Joe Nies

I used the #39 straight into (no preamp) an Audio Research VT-100 Mk-III (Audio Artistry Dvorak speakers).

I much prefered the sound of the Rega Apollo into a BAT VK-300 SE (Thiel 1.6 speakers).