An Audio Note Kits Dac 5.1 is ~£2,750 before taxes and import costs, and walks all over ANUK’s lesser stuff, plus we’d have the highly compelling bonus of Jim trying to figure out which end of a soldering iron to hold… 
Surprised Sodders hasn’t recommended one of these
On Definitive’s Stuff list
Their blurb calls it a Digital to Audio converter and they don’t really tell you anything about the design but I still want it 
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Philips TDA 1543 R2R ladder DAC
Thanks, I did a quick search but didn’t see that. I have a TDA 1543 DAC from Abbas.
it is orange
I’d worry the sound might be a bit coloured…
TRUMP coloured! 
@Jim what is it you don’t like or want to change about the sound of the Eversolo DAC?
The A6 uses an ESS DAC and OPA1642 opamp which are both very good but I do find that the chinese made DACs have a somewhat boring or adequate sound.
It’s unlikely you will find anything at £3k to beat your Nagra playing CDs. The DAC in the EverSolo is nice but a bit lifeless. I prefer NOS DACs but YMMV, especially when playing HD tracks. My Audial is 16-bit and the AD1865 DACs are 24/96 at best. I’d get the power supply in the A6 upgraded to linear from switched.
I have a couple of Rabski DACs. I’ll bring one along to Paul’s bash.
Errr…nothing really Chris, it’s mostly adequate.
What prompted this is that I had an issue with a cd that I very much like and have played a lot recently - Shana Cleveland - Manzanita. It started to skip when playing on the Nagra. Tried cleaning it, but to no avail. This has only happened with one other cd that I own which also skips. The Nagra plays all other CDs fine apart from these two, fuck noes why 
Anyways, I wanted to listen to Shana a couple of days back, so found it on Qobuz. I was disappointed that despite it being a hi-rez flac file, the sq of the streamed version was noticeably inferior to the memory of the cd played on the Nagra.
To ensure my hifi memory wasn’t playing tricks, I ripped (from Soulseek) and burned a copy of the Shana album onto a blank cd. Playing the ripped cd back-to-back (switching between inputs on the M7) with the streamed flac file from Qobuz just confirmed it - the Nagra sounded much better.
Now, loads of digi-folk on here have said to me many times that there should be no audible difference between a streamer flac file and a cd. So that has made me think the dac on the streamer could be bettered.
This looks nice if you wanted to consider a CD player with digital inputs (SPDIF and USB). Probably wouldn’t better the Nagra but it would be interesting to hear if it was close. Metronome seem to have a really good rep for CD replay. I have never knowingly heard one though.
This is true so long as the origin point for both files is the same. I was recently testing a completely ordinary £500 CD player and was intrigued to find that a CD of Amadou and Mariam’s La Confusion sounded better than the 24 bit file on Qobuz streamed into the same DAC hardware. I suspect that the streaming services apply more compression here and there in order for the services to work efficiently than would be the case with you ripping yourself.
FLAC is a wrapper. You can re-encode a source 96Kb/s MP3 in a 24 bit 192KHz FLAC if you want.
It’s always been about the source. I’m still amazed (OK I’m not) that people are still wanking themselves into comas about hi-res audio when there is absolutely no fucking way they would be able to reliably (statistically) pick it out from Redbook if the source master material was the same.
The problem with any material is identifying what the underlying master is. It takes effort and the ability to read a scope. As well as detective work to understand what was released and when.
Ok, I think I geddit. But I don’t t want to be a detective, I really like Qobuz because of the convenience and the ability to have a quick listen to new releases and loads of other stuff.
So are you saying that buying an outboard dac for the Eversolo will be a waste of time? Even if there was a streaming source on the net that allowed access to files ripped from a cd or the original master, they would sound as good as the Nagra anyway.
Does a subscription streaming service even exist that has files exclusively ripped from a cd or the original master?
The messaging is don’t get hung up on hi-resolution audio. It’s marketing. The source recording matters and for that you’ll need to be lucky or prepared to do a lot of legwork.
By all means play with DACs. The DAC chip itself is much of a muchness these days. A lot of “xyz DAC sounds like this” is really down to the analogue sections of the DAC, all imvho.
I’ve found that even effectively-identical rips played from a local HD source wired direct into the same DAC still don’t sound the same as CD, and mostly (but not always! WTF?) they don’t sound quite so good. There will be a simple technical reason why this is so - probably the USB-S/PDIF interface, but it’s a thing anyway. I don’t care because both sound great.
Get the Nag serviced - it may not even need a new laser: some lenses yellow and cloud-up like car headlights, and some get displaced out of position so can’t focus fully throughout the range of operation, occasionally components on the i/o board fail - a good tech (or Nagra themselves ££££) can get it working 100% again. Even if you do find a DAC you like better, it’s hard to imagine a better transport.
I’d like to hear a few different DACs in my system, so more than happy to run a few through it on the 15th, but obviously your system is a lot more revealing, so gonna make sense for you to schedule a get-together at some point.
This isn’t something to rush after-all - differences between DACs are incremental at best, but those differences can get really annoying over time, and you don’t want to be left with an expensive mis-step on your hands!
@Jim very happy with digital since getting an Aqua La Scala DAC, having tried a good few. Recent ones have gone for close to your budget on PFM etc.