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blitz1856

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  1. CR250, thanks, glad to hear you think I am on the right track. In my earlier hobby days I bought and sold a lot of used equipment, essentially a test drive with a limited loss (shipping) if buying used at a good price. I have to start somewhere, but ultimately I would like to experiment with both a direct connection to my amp and also try it through the analog bypass on my pre/pro to see if I can get away with it. In order to run that comparison, I would need something like an NAD M51 with remote volume. There are certainly other options like Audio-gd (for example). The M51 has the benefit of being fairly common used and also likely easy to resell. The GuMBy seems to be new enough to be rare on the used market although it would likely be exceptionally easy to sell. I probably would not even lose much if I bought it new and decided not to keep it. Point taken on specs and the importance of the analog section. I don't want to be narrow minded, but again, I do have to pick SOMETHING to start with in my own system. I have not owned a separate DAC for many years and it sounds like the technology has come a long way in recent years. Norton, no, I would not want to say that a remote is MORE important than SQ, but I really hope I don't need to make that compromise. I tend to adjust volume a lot and during a period where I had a broken remote, I felt like a jumping jack getting up and down constantly. One reason why I want to at least test a good digital volume vs. the analog volume in my XMC as it would put the Chord products on the table. If the digital volume is superior, then I will likely have to live with a smaller pool of products.
  2. Maximum, thanks that is a good suggestion. It is an XMC-1. I was thinking how it can only process digital at 24/48 for Dirac and bass management and was overlooking the Reference Stereo bypass. I believe I recall Emo saying it is essentially the same analog path as the XSP, which in John Johnson's review for Secrets he mentioned amazing sonics and reference measurements regardless of price. I may have gotten tunnel vision after reading so many reviews on a well implemented digital volume being more transparent than analog volume, but using the XMC does open up a lot of additional possibilities including the Bimby and Gumby. Also makes the connections easier to manage.
  3. Gee, I apologize for the formatting. I pasted that in and then read it back in preview mode and did not notice all of those run together words. Not sure what happened. I would edit but don't see that option.
  4. I posted the questions below on AC and did not receive any replies, then I discovered this forum which looks like a better venue, and registered. So, hello! I have a Transporter which has previously been feeding music from a computer inanother room to a digital input on my Emotiva processor. As I recently ordered a pair if Phil 3speakers, I want to look at improving my 2 channel front end after previouslymoving away from 2 channel a few years ago. My amps have both RCA and balanced inputs, so as long as one chain isoff while the other is on, I believe I don't need to worry about HT passthrough and am thinking dedicated paths so I can keep my processor out of the 2channel system. At some point I would like to replace the LMS/Transporter system with (probably) Roon and the appropriate end points, but first things first... So....I would like to try out one of the new approach DACsusing FPGAs rather than off-the-shelf chips, in particular the Schiit productsor Chord Hugo, but unfortunately this would require a separate preamp (I onlyneed remote volume, not input switching for a direct connection to myamp). The Hugo TT is way out of my pricerange. The NAD M51 (not sure if itis technically FPGA but does use a custom solution) seems highly regarded and has remotevolume but is also about 3 years old at this point. Any others in the $1,000 - $1,500 new/usedrange I might want to investigate? Myissue with a preamp is that it would be a budget buster to get one of goodenough quality to not be a bottleneck. A$1,000 preamp would mean going all the way down to a $500 DAC, just to get aremote volume control. I would beinterested in something like a Schiit Gungnir Multibit or used Hugo with aTortuga LDR (or something else equally transparent) but that would mean $2k -$2.5k+ and not sure it would be all THAT superior to a used M51 around $1k. Curious what others think?
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