SashaV

Some years ago I looked into DVC and all of them I tried were ultimately disappoint, a few worked quite well with 16/44.1 but any 24bit material suffered greatly when attenuated. Has anything changed nowadays, is there any high bit DVC (32 bit or higher) that is capable of attenuating 24bit material without degradation? Short of such DVC, can anyone recommend DAC with very good VC in analog domain after DA conversion, or very, very transparent unity gain analog preamp with VC?

Has anyone compared a purposely build PC based player with Lynx AES16 card to any of the recently released USB to SPDIF converters such as Empirical off-ramp 4, Berkeley Alpha, M2tech hiFace Evo? By purposely build PC I mean HW and SW optimized, with all the unnecessary HW disabled and low footprint OS, not just Lynx card installed into a generic PC as it would be severely handicapped. In other words, has anyone who invested s lot of money and effort into PC/AES16 found it was outperformed by one of the new USB/SPDIF converters that support 24/192? And has anyone taken jitter measurements in such comparison?