Hello, James.
There are 52 pages of posts in this thread, and I don't wish to spend an hour or two reading through them. Please tell me what is special about the BDA-3 DAC.
I use my Mac Mini as source, and usually stream Tidal. 98% of my music is CD quality.
Regards,
Michael
Hi Michael,
If most of your music is streaming and at 44.1/16bit I would say your MAC Mini would be just fine. The BDA-3 is more appropriate if you want to listen to higher resolution files and are concerned about ultimate fidelity available with those kinds of files.
I think the BDA-3 DAC does a better job at 44.1 as well but I think that is something you should audition for yourself. I am not a fan of the current streamed music as I do not find it to be anywhere near as good as a ripped CD or high resolution files Mastered correctly.
The BDA-3 DAC is optimized when it comes to jitter, noise floor, grounding and power supply design as well as dual DAC's for separate left and right channels. Also the BDA3 has a multiple inputs so it gives you a central position for all your digital sources to be played through a quality DAC.
The BDA-3 DAC has been compared and measured relative to DAC's costing many multiples of cost above ours and I think you can spend a lot more money on a DAC but you will not get better performance than the BDA-3 can provide assuming accuracy is what you are after.
I think though that auditioning it yourself is the best way to assess what benefits the BDA-3 would have in your system because as I have said many times - "if you don't hear a difference stop spending"
james