Icarium, you've guessed the purpose of my exploring dacs - I want a home based source for flac. I've got the iRiver h120 in hand, and now its just the dac. The iRiver cost $165 and I was looking to spend about $550 tops so I've got about $400 or so to play with.
When you say "there are a lot of dacs in the 200-1k price range" do you mean to say that any of these are as good as the other? I'm not clear as to how the dac I choose will effect the music. I passed on an alien dac, was that a bad idea given that I've got $400 ready to go?
Is the performance of a dac just a measure of resolving power? Does dac performance scale approximately linearly with cost? Or are dacs like CDP and amps...? Where it comes down to personal preference at each price bracket?
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