Lateral move or real upgrade?

If you go with the bifrost make sure you...
- get the UBER analogue upgrade
- get a good power cable - like those from Signal Cable should suffice
- get a really good interconnect - again, the silver Resolution interconnect from Signal cable is great value for money

The Bifrost will reward you - it's a great DAC and it responds extremely well to the above tweaks. There's more in that box than meets the eye!

I have the Bifrost and in my system it's kicking some much higher priced butt

Granted, better cables will up the anti on any DAC, but the bifrost seems to excel when given the right cabling.

Regards

Oooops, one last item...

I also second the Audirvana route - I also tried Bitperfect, but found Aurdirvana to be much better and it integrates nicely with iTunes, which I control from my droid tablet with 'Retune", another very good program.

I use all three inputs on the Bifrost and cannot discern any difference, so the coax input is very good. For that I am using a Van den Hul "The Name" which works extremely well.

I like the fact the Bifrost does not upsample. Upsampling on a previous DAC was not done well and put me off.

I also like the fact that the Bifrost does 24/192 on all three inputs and you can grade to the USB at a later date.

Hope this helps

Thanks, Willie. When you changed from BitPerfect to Audirvana, did you have to
uninstall BitPerfect or just disable it before installing Audirvana? I see Audirvana
offers a free trial period.

Thanks to all for the advice so far.

You do not have to uninstall Bitperfect, just disable it.

I setup Audirvana so that it does not upsample and disabled volume controls and equalizer functions - just playback of the digital data right from the files.

Audirvana support is also very responsive - had to email them a couple of times at first - they have a good online PDF manual - see support

It will also play flac files via iTunes using proxy files - see the manual for a full description of what you need to do - really simple and works.

It is a little tricky to setup if your music files are on a NAS drive - the proxy files have to be on the hard of the computer running Audurvana.

Regards.

Gosthouse, I still think the Bifrost with the Vlink will be a lateral move. The Vdac II would be a slight upgrade. Try to upgrade the power supply of your Vdac if you have not already. Bifrost is not a bad dac, I just don't think it is a step up from MF dacs.