DAC that re-clocks for under $1000?

Kijanki, all tech speak aside, i think we all agree that Benchmark's product probably sounds better than the music hall and the ps audio. You are saying Benchmark has less distortion, your post is in favor of their product? I am a bit more new to this research so could you expand a bit on what you are saying? thanks.

Kijanki, I will read your link - looks like it is loaded with great info, thanks...

Realremo - Benchmark is not on the warm side. It is pretty neutral and resolving/revealing. I have class D amp (Rowland 102) that is also neutral and resolving. Combination of two with my previous Paradigm Studio/60 v2 speakers was a little bright (painful on some records). I changed speakers to Hyperion HPS-938 and now everything is creamy smooth and even bright recordings sound nice and musical.

Before Benchmark I had Cambridge CD4SE. I was really surprised with Benchmarks clarity. Initially it sounded like some instruments were missing (too clean). Some people call it sterile - I call it very clean.

I cannot tell you how it compares to other DACs since I never had other DACs in my setup.

I am surprised that no one has mentioned the MF V-DAC - I guess it does not re-clock the signal. It gets very high scores on comparison tests with other DACs that are much more expensive.
Per the Empirical Audio website, once jitter is removed or greatly eliminated, the playing field is leveled for DACs, so maybe my path is MF V-DAC and Airport Express for now, then purhcase a re-clocker later (like the Pace Car). I would like to run PC Audio wirelessly using digital coax, does anyone know how? Nugent thinks optical ICs are more jitter-prone than digital coax.

Realremo - Airport Express has only optical out but it doesn't matter if DAC has very strong jitter rejection. My Benchmark has jitter bandwidth of few Hz and at frequencies of interest (kHz) has over 100dB rejection (of a jitter that was -60dB or lower). Stereophile wrote primer on jitter http://www.stereophile.com/reference/1093jitter/ You'll find some info on reclockers there.

Jitter is noise in time domain. In frequency domain it creates sidebands that are not harmonically related to root frequency and therefore audible even at very low levels. With music (complex signal) it is basically noise. Since it appears only when signal is present and it is proportional to signal level it cannot be detected without signal and can be judged only as a lack of clarity.

Typical transport's digital out switches with about 25ns transition time. Better transports do it perhaps faster. Faster transition means more problems with reflections on characteristic impedance boundaries but slower transitions suffer from induced noise or threshold/system noise (case of toslink). Whole thing depends on all three components (transport, cable, DAC) but Toslink in general makes about 2x worse jitter than coax. On the other hand if your DAC has strong jitter rejection then Toslink might be a blessing because it breaks ground loops.