The best DAC for the money

Theta basic II for $300.

Electrocompaniet, I have compared it to Audiomeca's Enkinathus X and Levinson'e 360. A great upsampling dac for the money.

I compared the Nixon with the similar Ack! and immediately chose the Ack!. I have since compared it favorably to the EAD DSP 7000 III and with a very nice and smooth recent Van Alstine. The Ack! runs on batteries, always a major improvement, with the added advantage of no powercord to imrove upon. I've upgraded my Ack! significantly by replacing the 3.3 mF AuraCaps with Dynamicaps, a pair of 5 mF and a .01 bypass per channel. It really opened up and the bass improved big time. I use it with an EAD T1000 with a Mapleshade/Insound Zepher dig link. Extremely open yet smooth, dead silent with wonderfull dynamics; the best I've heard.

The Ack! dAck Rev 2.0 was announced yesterday as a 2nd generation design and a major iteration of the original dAck in a press release

PeAK

Check it out the Silver Eagle Audio Signature I (single-ended tube DAC- using 6X5 tube rectifiers and 6J5 in-and output tubes). I have never listened to this tube DAC since the day I started getting into this hobby and just went to CES 2005 no DAC can beat this one sonically.