Looking for a DAC that has..

Correction: Octave uses total of 8 "industrial" dac chips, 4 per channel. I couldn't find anywhere on the net what those dac are. It seems Metrum really goes out of their way to protect this. The only info I could find is they aren't originally made for audio use but for other high speed real world applications such as data collection.

Njs, thanks for sharing the experience. Not that I'm not convinced with synchro-mesh but it's very comforting to hear what you said.

Even if 4 parallel dacs processing one channel are 16 bit, they would all be processing the same 16 bits, and on 96/24 material, 8 bits would get lost.

The idea behind parallel DAC chips is usually to multiply the current output to create more drive.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

I see. Thanks for the info. I may still try Octave regardless because it seems whoever tried Octave (A'gon, Audiocircles and a few others) have nothing but good things to say and the quality of their systems are equal or better than mine. Secondly I did try feeding Electro-ECD1 dac with Oppo-95 when I had it and preferred the sound of Oppo-95 by itself.

With ECD1+Syncro-mesh (when it arrives), I expect the combo to be on par or better than Oppo-95. But Metrum might just be the ticket to step up more without spending a whole lot more. My transport for the next 2 years might just be AppleTV (until something comes along with better interface for my all-in-one system - HT, games, 2ch) and Metrum might being "just" a 16-bit or not playing 192 material probably isn't a huge concern. BTW, once the Oppo is gone, AppleTV feeding straight to ECD1 just isn't cut it no more.