? 200$ dac comfusion ?

[nikolas00]

Hello everyone,

Well I owned a quad 606 which am in love with its sound for years now I cannot move to another one I use it with an integrated rotel with only the preamp stage so my next move is to buy a passive preamp (as everyone suggest for quad amps) and a dac as my only source of music now is the computer.Chipset speaking as much as I read through the internet and as much as I remember the burr brown chips are the most close to the character of the quad (typical hifi or English kinda sound) so I was thinking something like a raspberry with Volumio digi one spdif to vdac and a custom linear psu for vdac but after that I come across with some eBay diy dac’s with brand new company chipsets like the 9038pro,ak4497 etc well I’m not very familiar with all the difference that I may hear but can you suggest me some kind of solution in general speaking?

Passive preamp + dac?
Preamp+dac all in one?
Passive preamp+ diy dac?

Is any of those combinations give me any noticeable difference?

Thanks for your time and sorry for all of these questions

 

[uchu007]

You can take the card asus STX II pc with the dac pcm1792 it's worth over for this price it low dac 10 x more expensive .......

 

[avddreamr]

Your amp has a thd of .03%, which is about 70db. As long as you don't have an impedance mismatch between your preamp and your amplifier you should be more than ok. In that most competently designed dacs will have thd that's at least 20 to 30 db better than your amp, and if the output impendence is at least 10x lower than the input impedance of your amp you will have no frequency response abnormalities. In your price range, I would suggest a toping dx3 pro (since it comes with a remote), if you don't need a remote aune x7s will be about 200 and be the best performing dac that you can buy in that price range that's already a complete unit. Both of these suggested dacs have built-in preamp functionality, and have channel imbalances that are much better than all but the very best preamps (not in the 200.00 range). Alternatively, since you are looking into using a rasberry pi, you may want to look in to a khadas tone board and the respective android boards that work with it.