Looking for a DAC that has..

For me, the Synchro-Mesh provides significant improvements in sound quality being placed between a Bolder modded Logitech Touch and an Eastern Electric DAC2 with DEXA discrete opamps. I've also used an OPPO BDP-95 at the front end of the chain with equally impressive results.

Prior to the Synchro-Mesh arrival, I used the Touch for casual listening owing to its convenience and struggled with the DLNA interface on the BDP-95 for when I wanted better sound quality.

Soundstage, detail and clarity are at all time highs with this current system iteration and I find myself spending more time in my listening chair and less at the keyboard.

I've had my Synchro-Mesh since the end of July and feel that you may well be better off with it and a lesser DAC than with a much more expensive DAC by itself. You really develop a sense for what the Synchro-Mesh does when you listen with it engaged for a while then turn it off.

Correction: Octave uses total of 8 "industrial" dac chips, 4 per channel. I couldn't find anywhere on the net what those dac are. It seems Metrum really goes out of their way to protect this. The only info I could find is they aren't originally made for audio use but for other high speed real world applications such as data collection.

Njs, thanks for sharing the experience. Not that I'm not convinced with synchro-mesh but it's very comforting to hear what you said.

Even if 4 parallel dacs processing one channel are 16 bit, they would all be processing the same 16 bits, and on 96/24 material, 8 bits would get lost.

The idea behind parallel DAC chips is usually to multiply the current output to create more drive.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio