DAC attack

[zaphod]

last week i added a DAC to my office system - a museatex Bitstream. i'm feeding it from a mietner CD-3 that is a great little transport.

since is this is an office system, no Logans in it, i listen with a pair of Stax SR-40's - so still 'stats

anyway, i've been listening to the CD-3 for years, had a rebuild done a year ago and am real familiar with the meitner/museatex sound. but this DAC really blew me away. notes seem to take forever to tail out as the resonance is finally back in the stream.

I opened up with Holly Cole's "Romantically Helpless" that starts with a slow almost melancholy version of Simon's One Trick Pony. I literally stopped everything i was doing and was pulled into the music which took on a realism that i had previously not heard.

That night i pulled some of the best from the home stockpile to bring in - Jay Leonhart, Bruce Dunlap and Crash Test Dummies. All very good pressings and productivity on Friday went way down (don't tell my boss )

i've never really played with an outboard DAC before, but this has really changed my viewpoint. the Bitstream has done wonders for "office background listening".

 

[amey01]

Yes, a good DAC is fantastic. I can't wait to upgrade the little Musical Fidelity X-DAC in my system.......any day now (I hope - WAF approval required first).

I have my eye on the Tube Technology Fulcrum DAC64, but it will most likely be something much more modest like a Benchmark. Oh well.....

As for listening in the office - even on a much more modest office system than yours, all I would do is drop everything and listen, so I'm much better off with silence. How do you find you accomplish any work with music on?