What to expect from a new DAC?

Ah the philosophy of better....

Still there is another technical factor to consider in what will be the source for your DAC....? A low jitter transport was critical back in the day for your discs.... Now you seem to need a low jitter USB source for digital files on your PC or server.

I have a nice Sonic Frontiers SFDI Mk II DAC with a nice tube output stage... How good of an asynchronous USB interface should I invest in....before I leave well enough alone and get a newer DAC with higher resolution format support and the Asynch USB DAC and transport interface.

IMO, the discussion of better becomes even more difficult.

(opinions wanted!!!)

First, the digital source is more important than the DAC itself. Muiltiple reviews in TAS show that a $1K DAC can sound almost identical to a $8K DAC when driven by a low jitter source (not a CD transport BTW).

Second, Most D/A chips have gotten a lot better (not all). They deliver more detail and better focus as well as blacker background due to improved S/N ratio.

That said, there are still a lot of poor newer D/A chips (ala AKM) as well as poor DAC designs that dont take advantage of what the better chips can do. There are also chips and DAC designs that are simply not musical. Some of the older ladder and NOS D/A chips are very musical and natural sounding, and so the market for NOS DACs, which is mostly on ebay and from China. The seoncd most irritating thing about newer DAC chips is the digital filtering that is built-in and cannot be disabled. Wrecks the SQ IME. this is why older NOS chips are popular and why some new ultra-high over sampling DACs are popular.

So, the bottom line is: deal with the jitter from your source first (computer or transport) and then think about a new DAC. Unlike what the advertising BS says, the DAC will not reduce the jitter enough. It still needs a low-jitter input signal.

Many cannot hear differences in DACs and sources due to poor active preamps. This is the bain of analog audio and all it takes to kill a systems performance. Try a passive transformer-based linestage instead. Much more transparent and no compression.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

source is important. And disc transports are very expensive to get right vs the lesser investment required for similar performance from computer audio digital to a DAC. Think of disc transport as trying to hit a moving target vs computer audio as trying to hit a still target... the complexity for disc transport is at least double that of computer audio.

Hmm..

So, my transport is a Levinson 31 Reference DAC.... so it was very expensive (and sounds great).

My preamp is an Audio Research LS15 active preamp (tubes). I tried the passive linestage attenuator 20 years ago and found it not to be the way to go...(with lesser gear then I now use) If memory serves, the music just seemed dead. Funny how things go round and round... What's different with a passive transformer linestage ..... (at the time... I was told... well... the analog impedance matches were just not quite right and you lost too much with the passive Adcom line stage attenuator.

What I want to do now is add a USB to digital Low jitter interface for a PC server. What would be a good match for the Sonic Frontiers DAC/LS 15 combination?

Steve~ what do you say about the jitter figures on this?

I just read some good buzz on the Mytek Digital Stereo 192 DAC. it upsamples to 192kHz and plays DSD files. The jitter reduction is just 10 picoseconds, which is extremely low. Can be used as a preamp with an analog, digital or bypass function, and multiple inputs and outputs. Contains the well reviewed Sabre Dac which is used by Oppo, Wyred and quite a few other well known brands.

Is source jitter still a concern if the DAC can reduce to 10PCS?