Lateral move or real upgrade?

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.

I would probably agree with Rotarius if you are going with the standard Bifrost, but with the UBER analogue upgrade you in effect getting an analogue section that is from the Gungnir - which I think would be a noticeable upgrade.

From their web site...

" This DAC/Analog upgrade card improves the sonic and measured performance of Bifrost, using a discrete, direct-coupled gain stage from Gungnir. This discrete stage is more sophisticated than the base Bifrost, with a more complex topology, and DC servo to eliminate capacitors in the signal path and to improve on the already impressive performance of the AKM4399 D/A converter."

It does sound sweet - Regards

Thanks to all for input.
Rotarius - I did upgrade the power supply. Snipped off the wire and connector from the V-DAC wall wart and connected it to a Pyramid PS3KX3 power supply. Been using that for some time now. Messing around with ICs right now. I can definitely hear differences in high end extension between two pair I had on hand. Maybe different ICs (and possibly software, as you and others suggest) would be better than changing out hardware. Still tempted, however....

Willie - If I did the BiFrost I was planning to get the analogue upgrade but not USB. Would use V-Link for USB to Coax instead.

Thanks again to all.

Don't see any problem with that - if works for your current config then it should be ok with the Bifrost. Saves you $150 as well :-)

What computer are you using?
Does it have optical out?
e.g. the headphone socket on current mac's is dual use for optical out also - you just need the 3.5mm optical adapter from ebay

I've tried both USB and optical on my mac and cannot tell any difference, except that the mac has an upper limit of 24/96 on the optical out for some reason only known to Apple.

Regards.

I would think you would have to go beyond the Bitfrost to get a substantial benefit over your V-DAC, V-Link, power supply combination.

I would invest in a software playback program prior to upgrading DAC.