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DAC Recommendations

johnacurtis

pfm Member
Hello
Having sold my house and currently in rented awaiting new house to be built, I have a question about dacs.
I will need to have it between my TV and pre amp. So the dac will need an optical in and an analogue rca out.
I have no idea about dacs, as my roksan Caspian cd player has it built-in. My system for context is Allegri + pre, EWA A40 power, Shahinian Compasses and a Simplex turntable with XX2 mk2.
So, which would be the most suitable dac and how much should I look to spend? Budget ideally upto £500, but can be more if needed. I assume probably not a good idea to buy second hand?
 
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Hello
Having sold my house and currently in rented awaiting new house to be built, I have a question about dacs.
I will need to have it between my TV and pre amp. So the dac will need an optical in and an analogue rca out.
I have no idea about dacs, as my roksan Caspian cd player has it built-in. My system for context is Allegri + pre, EWA A40 power, Shahinian Compasses and a Simplex turntable with XX2 mk2.
So, which would be the most suitable dac and how much should I look to spend? Budget ideally upto £500, but can be more if needed. I assume probably not a good idea to buy second hand?
Is this just for the tv or are you going to use it for general hifi?
 
My mate has an MF X10V3 missing link tube buffer on his TV/box output, it helps with the lower quality sound through a good hifi apparently.
 
Thank you all. Its an ordinary Panasonic 55" lcd. I have been using a Denon micro system into AE100s and to be honest its sounds fantastic. My main hi fi was in the dining room. New house will have smaller rooms and mean I need to use the Denon to boost another TV and use my main system in the main lounge.
Think I will look into the Topping further.
 
You can buy a basic toslink to rca out DAC for £15 or less - do you need a better solution just for TV audio?
 
If you don’t run the TV through the main system, no. I do and a 2Qute is perfect but I use it because it’s otherwise redundant. I certainly wouldn’t have bought it for that purpose. Cheap Topping perfect I should think.
 
Yes, just for my TV!
If it's just for your tv then I would not spend anythign like £500. Presumably you only need a single optical input .
Something like this would be way more than you need (in a good way).
https://jdslabs.com/product/atom-dac-plus/
see
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/jds-labs-atom-dac-review.23701/
You could prbably get a cheap optcial dac on ebay for much less, and it would probably do, but this looks a really good product and you might use the usb input one day.

Or maybe a topping e30.
 
Tv's have crappy optical outs with lots of jitter across a high bandwidth. No need to spend much but make sure you get one that can accommodate the quality of a tv's optical out, not all can.

£100 worth of Topping should suffice.
 
A DAC with switchable inputs is very useful (just like my 2qute as it happens ;)). Feed the tv in on the optical (isolating all the noise on the tv's earth along the way) and leave the other(s) inputs for something more important.
 
I misunderstood your original post when recommending dac's up to £500, if you had not mentioned the rest of your system I would have understood. Anyway I have a Fiio Taishan, including an optical lead you can have for £10 inc post, it's all you need.
So long as your TV can provide USB power presumably.
 
On the subject of tv audio generally. I think it's a shame that there doesn't seem to exist (AFAIK but would be delighted to be corrected) a sensible decent entry level audiophile (sort of Nad 3020 standard) integrated 2 channel amp with HDMI in and enough decoding to mix down dolby/dts to 2.1, assuming the tv can;t or won't do that for you. It doesn't need to worry about the more esoteric codecs and doesn't need to do anythign to video beyond passing it through (I'm assuming one wants at least the option for multiple inputs as well as audio passback from the tv).
I use a really low end marantz av amp for this purpose which is sort of ok but I suspect unnecessarily low quality. One thing which ASR has taught us which 20 years of What hifi has not is that AV amps are almost universally terrible, even the expensive ones. There's no escuse for it apart from the fact that they don't apparently need to be any better. This in itself might be enough to make one wonder....
 


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