On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 16:35:59 +0000 (UTC)
Jay wrote:

If I buy a 2nd-hand DAC, is that going to give me a good sound, as opposed
to buying a CD player for the same money as the DAC? I'm talking low budget
here?

Probably makes very little difference - a CD player mechanism is dirt cheap these days (like, sub 5UKP probably). All the rest of the money is divided between markup and the digital-analogue electronics.

The question is what do you want it for?

If you just want a better CD source, give your cheapie to someone who hasnt got one or something, and buy a new CD player.

If you want to get nice digital sound from a PC or have multiple digital sources, buy a DAC.

Be warned though that only a very few companies produce good DACs (ie. that outperform the ones in CD players).

My ARCAM Delta Black Box 3 sounds good to me, although I suspect the high end modern DACs in expensive CD players beat it.

Meridian appears to be 'the' name in DACs currently, and their design (to all intents and purposes) eliminates jitter (which the cheaper DACs dont generally do so well. Their output filtering is apparently good as well.

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