Looking for a DAC that has..

Kz, I'm with Steve on this one. The Esoteric is not magically going to turn your mediocre digital source (Apple TV) into a good one. Going after a "good deal" in digital audio can be deceiving; price performance improves rapidly and if a DAC sells for 50% off is is usually because there are equivalent or better DACs for sale for half the MSRP.

Hi Steve and Edorr,
Excellent point. It gives me a lot more to think about. A quick google search on Esoteric D07 internal reclocking turned up pretty much nothing. Even the two reviews from Absolute Sound and Stereophile do not mention much about it. Maybe also because people that are using Esoteric would never even consider using mediocre source like AppleTV.

Anyway, one more development with Oppo-95. The unit just passed 600 hr burn-in mark last night and I'm quite in awe. I absolutely love the sound pairing with Pass Labs XA30.5 amp and XP-10 linestage. I do use the usb flash drive input (no moving parts, very short signal path from the drive to the sabre dac). I'm most impressed with mediocre apple lossless downloads from iTunes. I'm pretty sure I'm not delusional, but once it passed approximately 615 hr playing time, it transformed into something that punches way above $1k price point. (I do wonder how many people returned their Oppo without giving it a proper burn-in time. I listened to it for 4+ hr straight last night without getting any hint of listener fatigue with mostly mediocre recordings. It sounds smooth, detail, dynamic and very airy.

I'm still returning 95 I guess because 105 is coming out very soon (late 2012) and it'll have digital inputs to use 105 as a dac, which I can take advantage of with AppleTV + Synchro Mesh. Given Oppo track record, 105 should be better than 95. With this quality of sound at this price point, I should not care much for the interface (secretly hopeful Oppo improves its mediocre interface though).

During the meantime, I will sell my ECD-1 dac and maybe get a Synchro-Mesh.

Maybe also get a mod from Modwright when they offer it for 105. They have done it for 83, 93 and 95. No reason to think they won't be for 105.

Also, Steve, can you please explain why the internal reclocking won't be as effective as an outboard clocker like Synchro-Mesh?

Steve, can you please explain why the internal reclocking won't be as effective as an outboard clocker like Synchro-Mesh?

Several reasons:
1) They dont use the best reclocker chip on the market
2) They dont use the best discrete voltage regulator
3) They dont use the best clock oscillator
4) Their implementation is not as good

I generally dont believe in reclocking in the DAC. It is better to leave the DAC alone and allow the source to have low jitter. If there is reclocking in the DAC, the benefits of a low-jitter source are diminished. This is why I dont reclock S/PDIF input inside my DAC.

Steve N.