I recommend a DAC with the Sony gear - I feel that the Redbook performance of the Sony players is merely average, but with a good DAC you can enjoy the best of both worlds: playback of new digital formats using the onboard DAC, and Redbook via a better third party DAC.
It is certainly true as Soix mentions that you must use a good digital cable and a good DAC that matches the Sony in order to achieve good Redbook performance when using the Sony as a transport, but this is not an insurmountable problem and with some good advice you could easily outperform the Sony's onboard DAC.
My personal recommendation would be the Chord DAC64 which has a huge buffer and reclocks the digital output of any transport. It is the most flexible and universally compatible DAC we've worked with in the sense that it will work with transports that have unusually high jitter or are tricky to mate with DAC's for other reasons (clock mismatches, etc.) Because of the Chord's large buffer and reclocking, it sounds great on every transport we've plugged it into, and it is a 24/192 upsampling DAC with both balanced and single ended outputs. Retail is $3040. Feel free to email or call 773 324 1240 if you'd like to discuss.
--Evan Trent
Symphony Sound
It is certainly true as Soix mentions that you must use a good digital cable and a good DAC that matches the Sony in order to achieve good Redbook performance when using the Sony as a transport, but this is not an insurmountable problem and with some good advice you could easily outperform the Sony's onboard DAC.
My personal recommendation would be the Chord DAC64 which has a huge buffer and reclocks the digital output of any transport. It is the most flexible and universally compatible DAC we've worked with in the sense that it will work with transports that have unusually high jitter or are tricky to mate with DAC's for other reasons (clock mismatches, etc.) Because of the Chord's large buffer and reclocking, it sounds great on every transport we've plugged it into, and it is a 24/192 upsampling DAC with both balanced and single ended outputs. Retail is $3040. Feel free to email or call 773 324 1240 if you'd like to discuss.
--Evan Trent
Symphony Sound