Allo Boss v1.2 or NJC Audio Reference Dac with R-Pi?

NJC have a good rep but far from mainstream. You may have to take a blind punt on it to really find out.

I'd seriously give the ASR forum a serious dose of looking at! Modern dacs without added 'foo' all generally measure far beyond our ear's capability now and an order of magnitude better than the amps and speakers they play into, but of course their'll be some chancers with added 'magic' to fool the ears...

You REALLY don't need to spend a fortune on dacs these days unless nice casework and facilities are most important and even the dac-for-a-fiver plus forty quid linear power supply can sound most impressive if you don't know what you're listening to..

A pal has NJC stuff (phono stage plus sut) and rates it very highly. Few people know of the brand, so it's not something to hold value right now should you wish to move it on. The Topping gear does seem very popular at mad-low prices for the performance you appear to get (another pal has used their little amps for years and rated them long before I knew they did much else) and they do seem to understand the dac chips they use and have now sorted the ESS distortion 'hump' that afflicted most implementations of the makers chips - whether this was audible or not is a moot point, but it was certainly there.

I suppose there may be a justification for looking to Benchmark and Chord at the expensive end of the dac market, purely because they do seem to be pushing the boundaries forward a bit, but in real terms I suspect it's largely inaudible in real terms although the vibes created by owning one of their products may well augment the listening experience and I'd not turn down a Benchmark DAC 3 if I had the chance... Under a grand, the RMI one looks good with plenty of facilities available.

You'd need to compare the Calyx with the dCS though..

Some dac's do seem to over-egg the pudding somewhat, but it's usually to tell a story for 'High End' peeps who need to feel they're spending their thousands/tens of thousands in a satisfying way, hance that godawful measuring TotalDac monstrosity which had so much effort put in to a basically not-so-good technology and only half understanding it seems, which digital audio is all about (according to knowledgeable peeps who do seem to understand it). dCS *to me,* do seem to go all round the houses over many boxes and thousands of quid, but is their top dac *really* better at audible decoding of a CD? I'm sure on the bench it's excellent, but having played for some time now with a 'dac-for-a-fiver' - now replaced by a similar looking but even simpler model - I have my doubts I'd tell blindfold unless one of these was altering the instrumental timbres or something (the cheap dac has lower output too, so that needs to be taken care of first in any comparison)...

Not sure really. The whole thread has kind of been answered imo, but there is a question linked to it as to how much a decently performing sonically transparent dac really needs to cost these days. Hell, even the Rega dac at £600 or so is rather expensive these days and that's *me* saying it!

I’m not sure which ones are available fir the Sennheisers, I’d personally avoid Van Damme though.