Hey now...
In the name of progress...i'm looking to better my digital playback. I'm sold on the ability of my 3000ES to put a smile on my face. No need to look at other DACs. I'm certainly not in a position to buck up for a REAL high-end DAC. EMM labs or something of that class. So i'm into working with what I have, which is good. Now i'm looking at bettering the signal being fed to the Sony.
I'd love to try out one of those Apogee Big Ben units, but it is financialy out of my reach. For those of you who are unaware of what this is, go to their www site and check it out. I've heard its quite stupendous for all digital playback.
I've tweaked my transport w/vibrapod isolation cones + its all ready dampened chassis that was done in a 3rd party MOD (toshiba 3960 dvd). I feel that I'd have to spend an aweful lot to better it in terms of transport performance with 24/96 PCM output, so I dont see that (new deck) as a good direction.
Research (and a new audio advisor catalog) led me to this:
http://www.monarchyaudio.com/which has a number of "black box" devices for bettering a PCM signal by means of jitter reduction, signal boosting and dithering.
In particular, the DIP "upsampler" model, wich re-clocks incoing PCM to 24/96 , stabilizes and then boosts the signal. $300 retail is not a huge investment, and I might give it a try eventualy. Especialy if I can find a used one.
This might be perfect for interfacing a long S/PDIF cable from a PC in another room as well as my transport. It has coax and toslink input, coax and AES output..so it could work very well indeed.
Anyone ever experience one of these?
Poor mans Apogee?