Hi everybody, I have an Arcam 75+ amp paired with a set of Diamond 9.1 speakers All my music is on my laptop (Dell XPS) and I am currently ripping it all into FLAC format onto my external hard drive. I have been reading that a DAC will benefit me immensely, but I don't know which one to get. It's really really confusing. How would I connect it to my laptop? Beresford or DAC Magic? arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggghhhhhhhh Help needed please! Thanks Deep
first thing is - does your lap top have a digital out - and in what is it i.e. Toslink (optical) , Coax (electrical) The Dac -magic can take both.
Beresford is the better of the two. The DAC magic is very over priced. Also take a look at the Zero, Aune and Valab NOS (all about 100) and the V-DAC (150)
Have a look at the Musical Fidelity V-DAC, Beresford or ZeroDAC (ebay) which have optical/coaxial/USB connection... I would give the DACMagic a miss as you can get better, cheaper, you might also want to have a look the Audio-GD Compass (also has optical/coaxial/USB connection) which is as well as being a DAC is also headphone amp+Preamp...
Me neither. How do you connect a DAC to something like a standard amp with phono ports? Surely you can do phono on DAC to phono on amp?
PC -> DAC = optical, coaxial (i.e. a single phono lead) or USB DAC -> Amp = Phono, i.e. standard interconnects. This is pretty much true of any DAC, apart from the USB connection which isn't available on all of them.
Yes The Beresford Caiman (which has a very good USB transport) would sound great with your A75 it's very detailed but also quite neutral, drop the DM it's overated and overpriced.
If you're on a budget I'd recommend the ZeroDAC. I got one off the bay for about £95 with OP627 op-amps (which are quite highly rated). USB version is about £105 so they're pretty cheap and do sound good.
