Looking for a DAC that has..

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.

Hello Steve thanks for all this info.

"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."

My Peachtree Audio IDAC reclocks, do you believe it won't benefit much from the synchro-mesh?

"My Peachtree Audio IDAC reclocks, do you believe it won't benefit much from the synchro-mesh?"

It probably will be beneficial, but an even better solution is to use Off-Ramp 5 and a computer. I believe iDAC was reviewed with Off-Ramp 4 in TAS in the last year or two.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Have you thought about listening below that level and using a passive?

benchmark just introduced a new dac - pretty feature rich, though below your price range:

http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/dac/dac2-hgc