Zenelectro, summed it up nicely, He can make a beautiful sounding Sabre base DAC, without all the Line Magnetics compromises. But at what price
Basically all the bits you need to make a really SOTA Sabre DAC board / spdif / USB input are available here and there on the net.
The real trick is knowing which ones to get and how to configure them. Yes I have an early Buffalo, it's junk.
Then a decent valve stage needs to be added and interface to the Sabre. Note the Sabre is balanced.
Valve power supply and a nice big enclosure to fit decent rectifier / valve / chokes etc. so it looks the part.
The whole thing can be done for around $3k finished, probably a bit extra for stupid expensive parts like Duelund.
This is a DAC that will do everything up to 192k PCM (maybe 384) / DSD from USB and PCM 192k from SPDIF
IMHO I believe a DSD only DAC with a software player to convert everything to DSD will sound better but there's no doubt
a very well configured Sabre will be very very good.
You asked!
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