musiclover Posted January 7, 2011 Share Posted January 7, 2011 I have been reading about ways to get better sound from my CD players and laptop. DAC's look like the way to go, but get more confused the more I read. I have a Denon SACD CD player, about 6 yrs old and a Marantz 5 disc carousel CD player about 2 yrs old. My son gave me his old Acer Aspire laptop about 3 yrs old. He has about 22,000 songs in his itunes library recorded in AIFF in Itunes. I have been reading about Benchmark, PS audio, Cambridge Dac Magic, Beresford and Musical Fidelity VDAC DACs. These would be in my budget. I want DAC that would work great with CD player and laptop. I/ve read where the USB ports on these DAC's are not that great. I/ve also looked at the HRT Music Streamer II USB DAC and Nuforce USB DAC. Would I be better off getting separate USB DAC for the laptop, then separate DAC for the CD players? Any information will be appreciated. Thanks. David Hammer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest " " Posted January 7, 2011 Share Posted January 7, 2011 There is a lot to think about in this project. aside from the things you are ready are being presented with, the laptop will be a tricky animal to optimize in a DAC solution. mainly becuase a DAC that has the qualities to WOW you, will expose the background wine from the hard drive. popular way around this is to have the files off the laptop on a shared network drive and have the local drive sleep when not in use. I have been using external DACs for a while. Im now moving all hard drive stuff to internal FLASH drives and getting rid of all the spin type drives. if you want to get a sense of what I am talking about, listen to an ipod with an internal spin hard drive, then listen to the same song on an ipod touch or iphone which use flash drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schu Posted January 7, 2011 Share Posted January 7, 2011 interesting stuff... subscribed. I can lend some credence to the flash vs HD topic. I just got a new ipod touch and compared to an old gen ipod with an HD it's night and day difference. My touch with headphones is uber quite and sounds wonderful Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
musiclover Posted January 8, 2011 Author Share Posted January 8, 2011 I/m still mainly a vinyl guy, just trying to get my digital to sound better. Love to find one DAC what would help my CD players and laptop and would not break the bank. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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