Is this enough?

Got a young DAC and foo power supply, any benefit in upgrading it? Second hand budget up to £2000

I remember when everyone had these!

I bought a new DAC recently, was £1600 used with external PSU. I like the idea of FPGA based DACs.

Made a chord mojo go and cry, but I guess it would at ten times the retail. Fabulous sounding thing with terrible remote and app, but I use neither anyway. Ex wadia staff, computational DAC that understands curvy math and shiz

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Never liked the Young DAC, didn’t sound right. Then again I prefer NOS so I’d say go get a DDDAC for about £1000 and you’ll think that the Young was broken :wink:

Borrow some and have a critical listening session. @Ijrussell must have over 100.
I had a good bake off there comparing several, but still preferred my own Chord TT (now a lot cheaper used).

This post. does contain one blatant exaggeration.

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But all DACs sound the same don’t they?

Where have you been, Dacs are the new R2R :smile:

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I had a Young with battery power supply. I thought it was excellent. I changed it for a Denafrips Terminator. It’s a massive step up. Every CD now sounds good whereas perhaps 90% sounded good with the Young. Plus they all sound better thsn they did with the Young. It’s a lot more analogue sounding.

Others I would have considered were T+A Dac 8, Luxman, Exogal, Bryston, Chord TT and htm’s valve dac (name escapes me).

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I had a young DAC, and loved it, it beat the shit out of DDDAC I borrowed. It took something by AN to dislodge the Young

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I had a Vega, and loved it. At the price they go for now, well worth a trial.

So I’m guessing that you’re the reason why Lotus has an ex-dem Ion, but no matching Comet :face_with_monocle:

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Haha no I got my comet a good while before.
I’d love to try the Ion but I’d have to rely on the ADC input in the comet for phono stage. Been reading a lot about how it works and it’s just mad how the two tiny boxes connected with hdmi work in the digital domain right up to the speaker terminals. The comet DAC sounds so ‘right’ I love it, it doesn’t pretend to be all hifi. People should demo one :slight_smile:

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£2000 used is about the price-point DACs start to get less bland and most will be better than your Young DAC. The Exogal Comet is a good buy as are the Aqua La Voce DACs. I’m a big fan of the DDDAC - NOS DACs have a certain ease and flow that most chip-based DACs don’t.

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There was an Aqua available on AOS recently.

That’s mine, it’s on here somewhere as well😉!
Still available.

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Denafrips Ares might be worth considering.

I would buy this one
https://www.oktoresearch.com/dac8stereo.htm

The 8 channel would be great for digital active, the 2 channel otherwise.

It measures better than anything else on the market, and with DACs, you want all of the SNR and then some. Euphonic lovely sound can come from the speakers, get the DAC with the detail.

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That looks very sensible.

Well I didn’t expect this much homework from this thread. Will get reading about these.