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

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!!!

You need to go to computer audiophile site if you want more up to date suggestions. Agon is mostly populated by analog afficionado's who have not kept up with current DAC technology. Any DAC recommended that doesn't support asynch USB and DSD is obsolescent