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Welcome. I have long been a 2 channel guy in a 5.1 (and 7.1 movie) system. I have spent lot so hours/experience/thoughts/$$ on making sure I have the best 2 channel system I can, while living amongst the HT world. I have succeeded thanks mainly to my acoustic guru, Jeff Hedback, and his wonderful treatment designs. My setup is in my system link. My acoustic makeover is in the thread called Show Us Your Room Pics (or something like that).I'm not at all trying to brag...I am simply trying to say that I empathize, and of the 100+ DSD-capable dacs out there you are now limiting yourself to maybe one or two of them (and limiting your sonics as well, as very few DAC/preamps have a decent preamp). Believe me, I've listened to dozens. The only one with a true HT bypass that comes to mind is the Wyred4Sound one, by the way. Several have an analog in, but most are not bypassed. I own three Myteks (as being a beta customer, good friend of Michal's, and a prototype for the 3 Mytek stack for 5.1 multichannel DSD surround that I wrote about here). As good as the Myteks are, they are not great preamps and their analog ins are only ok (although if you are doing movies only, it's not bad..if you are doing hirez PCM surround you are challenged a bit). But to their defense, for $1600 that is not what they were built for.
I use the Benchmark DAC2 HGC in the exact way that you describe. What makes it such a good value at the $2k price point is its analog line stage. I use one analog input for my phono preamp and the other in HT Bypass mode for multi-channel playback. I know the sound of my phono rig very well. The fact that vinyl playback took a nice step forward in clarity and dynamics when I moved to the DAC2 as a preamp says a lot about the quality of the line stage.The DAC2 doesn't decode double DSD. And it doesn't have the bloom and harmonic richness that a tube output stage can produce. Other than that, the combination of sound quality and functionality is pretty compelling at its price point.Russ
Oppo 105 Darbee. You can also use it with your HT.
I have succeeded thanks mainly to my acoustic guru, Jeff Hedback, and his wonderful treatment designs. My setup is in my system link. My acoustic makeover is in the thread called Show Us Your Room Pics (or something like that).
Not to go too far off topic, but I second the comments about Jeff. He made my room sound amazing.
Thanks Russ. I'll definitely put the Benchmark on the candidate list. You are happy with its sound?
David, I did NOT know you used Jeff. I love the guy. Here is his work, and although the HAR slats for the ceiling cloud and side wall diffusers are the most prominent,. it's his 400 lb MAT (membrane absorber trap...i.e floating wall) concealed behind my video screen that cleaned up my 2 channel soundstage like nothing I'd every experienced.http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=53699.msg893756#msg893756I mention all this cuz separating 2 channel from HT is not easy, but can be done.
Thanks! Since then the 2 channel equipment is now up front (eases the short cabling issues) and the SP Tech Revs are about a foot and a half further into the room.Mattsf, the more I think about it the more we need to find you a deal on the Benchmark that Russ has. I disliked their Benchmark 1 a lot, and have to award them the turnaround sound of the year award with their Benchmark 2 series of DACs. A warm but neutral-enough sounding DAC that is very very nice (I like warm, by the way, assuming it really means colorful, lots of timbre and tone, with good resolution but not microscopic that often over analyzes). And you need to trust Russ's ears as far as the internal preamp goes.
I wonder if this means that it converts DSD signals into 32-bit PCM for the pre-amp. That's not ideal from what I understand.
MW: How do you handle volume control in that final output stage? Do you convert to analog and then turn it up and down.JS: We actually don’t. We do process that at the high sample rate and we have multiple 1-bit converters that are available to us. So the increase in word length that we get as a function of that volume control makes use of the redundant 1-bit converters that we have running in parallel.MW: I see.JS: So we’re not converting it…in a way you could look at that as if it’s PCM because there’s multiple 1-bit converters summed together in the analog domain. But that’s what you have to do to get volume control to work. The good thing is we don’t take it from 1-bit to multi-bit and back to 1-bit before we convert it to analog.MW: Yep, as you were saying before.JS: Instead of sending identical DSD signals to sixteen balanced 1-bit converters that are wired in parallel, we start sending different DSD signals to reduce the signal amplitude. All summing occurs in the analog domain. It is very cool!
