NOS DACs

Thank you very much for the advice, I will pass on the Musette. I am still very curious about NOS but from everything I've read, a good one is out of my budget. The Airist definitely piqued my interest, however, I may have a hard time hooking it up to my headphone rig at home, since I use a CTH at the office and the two would look great stacked together. This is the same issue I'm having with the Bifrost Multibit being pulled from my headphone rig and being put with my speakers... because it looks so damn good stacked with the Saga. If only my living room weren't so large, the speakers and the headphones could share a source... first world problems, I suppose.

 

I have a MCTH and Bifrost on my desk. I just got one of these monitor stands:

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07H4HDQ5M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

You could try the Metrum Flint for fun.

 

“For shits and gorillas” maybe?

Do you still have the Onyx as well @msommers

 

Yep I do. Until I can afford to move up the Pavane/Adagio, I'm pretty sure I'll keep it.

 

Have you had ears on either or them yet, or just assuming you will like them based on Onyx and what other people have said about them?

 

Unfortunately I can't afford to drop $500 on a Flint for shits and giggles. I am really curious about NOS DACs but I'll likely just wait for the next nearby meetup and try a few there. I should probably focus these funds on upgrading my turntable needle anyway...who needs digital when you've got a good analog source?

Really, what I need to do is learn to bend time and space so my speakers and headphones can share a source without the use of 30 ft of analog cables. But that's well beyond the scope of this thread...

 

Yep. I'd like audition it first but any quibbles I do have with Onyx seem to be address in Pavane, according to users.

 

@ohshitgorillas Cheap(er) NOS is mostly rubbish. Could try Soekris DAC1321 with NOS and/or NOS-like filters to satisfy your curiosity.

Or get a brand new Bifrost Multibit which supposedly sounds better than the earlier ones - @purr1n can probably expand on this.

 

Well, I already own a basically new Bifrost Multibit and it's pretty f'ing good. I don't have a lot to compare to, but it upstages the Modi Multibit (v1, waiting on the v2 chip) by quite a big margin in staging/imaging/separation, and by a far smaller but still significant margin in terms of realism, transients, and note decay. My issue is that I bought it for my headphones and ended up using it with my speakers instead. I'd go through the trouble of moving it back and forth from one setup to the other if it didn't take a few hours of warm up before it got good.

In any case, I think I am going to move the Bifrost back over to my headphones, use the MM for my speakers, and get a replacement needle for my Ortofon cartridge (Bronze). It's a modded Rega P3 running a Shure M97XE right now and hooked up to the speakers. I think if my vinyl rig were less fuzzy and more lively, I wouldn't miss the difference between the Modi and Bifrost as much.