What to expect from a new DAC?

It is all realative. I have not been impressed with a new DAC and returned it.
My 10 year old DAC is just as good.
I am sure some will find a new DAC better than the old one.
But it is a total crapshoot.
So be certain you CAN return the new one if it is no better.

i have heard older digital equipment, like the naim cdx, 2 box cd player of the 90's, sounding every bit as good as anything in production, that i have auditioned.

then again, we encounter the connotation of "{better", which makes audio, a subset of philosophy.

it is very difficult to come to a definitive conclusion, when the subject is what component is better than another.

it is obvious that there are different criteria used to evaluate audio components.

this is an issue when discussing the sonic merits of components, on a relative basis.

Ah the philosophy of better....

Still there is another technical factor to consider in what will be the source for your DAC....? A low jitter transport was critical back in the day for your discs.... Now you seem to need a low jitter USB source for digital files on your PC or server.

I have a nice Sonic Frontiers SFDI Mk II DAC with a nice tube output stage... How good of an asynchronous USB interface should I invest in....before I leave well enough alone and get a newer DAC with higher resolution format support and the Asynch USB DAC and transport interface.

IMO, the discussion of better becomes even more difficult.

(opinions wanted!!!)

First, the digital source is more important than the DAC itself. Muiltiple reviews in TAS show that a $1K DAC can sound almost identical to a $8K DAC when driven by a low jitter source (not a CD transport BTW).

Second, Most D/A chips have gotten a lot better (not all). They deliver more detail and better focus as well as blacker background due to improved S/N ratio.

That said, there are still a lot of poor newer D/A chips (ala AKM) as well as poor DAC designs that dont take advantage of what the better chips can do. There are also chips and DAC designs that are simply not musical. Some of the older ladder and NOS D/A chips are very musical and natural sounding, and so the market for NOS DACs, which is mostly on ebay and from China. The seoncd most irritating thing about newer DAC chips is the digital filtering that is built-in and cannot be disabled. Wrecks the SQ IME. this is why older NOS chips are popular and why some new ultra-high over sampling DACs are popular.

So, the bottom line is: deal with the jitter from your source first (computer or transport) and then think about a new DAC. Unlike what the advertising BS says, the DAC will not reduce the jitter enough. It still needs a low-jitter input signal.

Many cannot hear differences in DACs and sources due to poor active preamps. This is the bain of analog audio and all it takes to kill a systems performance. Try a passive transformer-based linestage instead. Much more transparent and no compression.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio