Quote:
Originally posted by Jason J:
It stands to reason that if you're using high quality components in your playback chain; an outboard DAC such as the DAC1 could serve you nicely. Your system would be able to bring out the subtle details that a higher quality DAC can reveal.


Jason, thank you for your response. The DAC1 promotes special features in it's design that seem to set it apart from other quality DAC's found in receivers, pre-pros, and players.

From the Benchmark brochure... "Many DACs derive their system clock directly from the AES receiver making them very susceptible to jitter. These DACs can rarely achieve their rated performance in real world applications. By contrast, the DAC1 takes full advantage of our jitter free UltraLock™ technology... The DAC1 provides some of the finest analog conversion through 192-kHz and all sample rates playback with a 52-kHz analog bandwidth. The performance of the DAC1 is unrivaled. THD+N is an astonishing low -106 dB (0.0005%) measured at 0 dBFS, at any playback frequency, at any sample rate, with any degree of input jitter..."

Considering this and your experience with other equipment, do you believe that the DAC1 represents a significant improvement over the many products (receivers, pre-pros, and players) that include high quality DAC's as part of their design? And, is the 52-kHz analog bandwidth in playback uncommon for DAC's?

thank you again...
Allan