What's the greatest bargain in DAC's these days?

After_hrs,
Yeah, I have to say that I'm not the world's biggest fan of Music Hall's stuff. I have their CD 25.2 CD player, which I now use as just a transport out to my DAC. It's fine for what it is, but when the remote died Music Hall was of no help. I eventually found a guy in LA who sold me a remote from another Music Hall unit that works with my CD player. But good luck getting service on their stuff.

Dgarretson,

The Sonore board was designed with the Buffalo DAC in mind. It accepts both PCM and native DSD, completely isolates the USB side from the clean side, has its own oversampling filter (optional to use) which they claim is superior to that on the ES9018 chip (I'm still evaluating that), and can be run synchronously with the Buffalo board if so desired.

Here's a link:

http://www.rendu.sonore.us/USB.html

It requires ~300mA to run and can be used with either a 5V supply fed into its own on-board regulator, or with a 3.6V supply bypassing its on-board regulator. I'm using a Salas Reflektor-D regulator set at 3.6V for mine. Sound is very, very nice...I especially like DSD so far.

I would look at the Schitt Dacs, hard to beat for the money. Upgradeable and non sampling if that matters.

I would agree that conventional DACS have platued in performance... I would personally look into better speakers, headphones for a quantum leap in performance

No schitt :-)

sorry, could not resist!!!