"Andy Evans" wrote in
message
oups.com...
I've ended up with this
http://www.cec-web.co.jp/products/dac/dx71mk2_e.html
I am extremely impressed with this unit.

It looks great. To my mind this really is the way to go -
the
DAC-Preamp. All your digital sources go into it and there
you are.

Can you give us a fuller description of how it operates
and sounds, and
in what ways it was better than the other equipment you
had before or
tried out?

I can't find any reviews of this, so the above would be
welcome.


Apologies for the late reply.

What I have been able to achieve with this is to "shorten"
the chain of gear and hopefully keep the signal integrity
more intact. So I now use the CEC as a DAC and a pre-amp
using it's balanced outputs direct to my Australian made
ME850's balanced inputs. So when I feed an AES/EBU (as
opposed to SPDIF) signal to the CEC I can use it's onboard
Clock and the result is IMHO quite spectacular. I really
never thought garden variety red book CDs could sound so
good. I will need to do some DBTs to compare to the
SACD/DVD-A equivalents now to confirm some this of course.

Doing a comparison with my Marantz DV8300 (multi player)
using SPDIF/TOSlink and then through a pre-amp I could not
tell a difference until I swapped the CEC to pre-amp
function as well.

The biggest gain I have noticed is "magically" that
fatiguing CD sound has gone and it has that more natural
SACD/analog sound.

It is still early days and I am still tweaking (playing
around) with this thing but my initial opinion is that it
really is something special.

BTW I am using this to feed the CEC


http://www.creative.com/products/pro...roduct=1 5189

So I can output a AES/EBU digital signal up to 192/24 and
set the preferences to allow for an external clock i.e. the
CEC's. So I keep a faithful digital signal all the way to
DAC/pre-amp.

I hope some of this helps. My suggestion is try to get hold
of a unit and demo it for yourself.

Regards TT