Wally wrote:


Judging by the prices that DACs are going for, I'm thinking that this would
be a good improvement over the existing setup for less than the cost of a
comparable player. My mate's £500 Arcam player has quickly established
itself as something of a benchmark - I'd like to approach, or improve on,
that sort of quality if feasible. My thinking is that, when my existing
player starts to bite the dust, I could look at getting a transport that can
take a timing signal from a DAC. Is it a standard signal for all (most?)
transports/DACs, or is it rather proprietary?

I'm sure an oscilloscope is a much cheaper approach... ;-)

Actually, he's being coy. 'Better kit' in this case most certainly
does *not* include DACs which can't suppress jitter in the datastream,
but they certainly cost a lot of money, and they do sound bad! :-)

Do you mean DACs that use a sync signal to control jitter, as opposed to
those which can take a raw datastream and make the best (or better) of it?
Would a DAC which has a sync output and a bunch of oversampling be the right
thing to go chasing after?


The best value for money in jitter immune DAC's is reputed to be the
Benchmark DAC1 which uses a sample rate convertor in front of the DAC.
It is a little out of your price range at $850 (no UK distributor
either).

I'd forget about word clock outputs for your purpose - very few CD
players can actually use them.

Cheers.

James.