Advice on DAC upgrade

[buonassi]

On 7/5/2018 at 7:55 PM, Ron Scubadiver said:

Why not an ifi idac2 micro

 

indeed, why not?  I was very happy with it and still think it's a great DAC.  You can upsample to DSD if you so desire.  You can switch to 'bit perfect' mode, which really is a bad label for an NOS setting, plus you have 2 other settings for playback filters.  It's versatile and really does lots of things right.  

 

the only reason to avoid this is if you want to use coax input.

[Ron Scubadiver]

1 hour ago, buonassi said:

 

indeed, why not?  I was very happy with it and still think it's a great DAC.  You can upsample to DSD if you so desire.  You can switch to 'bit perfect' mode, which really is a bad label for an NOS setting, plus you have 2 other settings for playback filters.  It's versatile and really does lots of things right.  

 

the only reason to avoid this is if you want to use coax input.

idac2 is on the radar.  My only reservation is I would need a preamp if I want to playback dsd directly because the volume is not ordinarily controlled by by the player.  There are a few DAC's where JRiver can control the volume, but I don't know if this is one of them.  (I would plug the idac2 directly into my power amp and use the player to control volume.)

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, Ron Scubadiver said:

idac2 is on the radar.  My only reservation is I would need a preamp if I want to playback dsd directly because the volume is not ordinarily controlled by by the player.  There are a few DAC's where JRiver can control the volume, but I don't know if this is one of them.  (I would plug the idac2 directly into my power amp and use the player to control volume.)

The idac2 has fixed level RCA outputs and 3.5 mm headphone jack with volume controlled by the knob on the device. Software control of the volume is not possible. You can of course always use a software volume control that modifies the audio data sent to the DAC.

[Ron Scubadiver]

37 minutes ago, mansr said:

The idac2 has fixed level RCA outputs and 3.5 mm headphone jack with volume controlled by the knob on the device. Software control of the volume is not possible. You can of course always use a software volume control that modifies the audio data sent to the DAC.

Thank you.  I was aware the fixed output on RCA.  More often than not, that is the case unless the device claims preamp capability.