I’ve been looking at it but it’s expensive. I’ll need both coax and the USB connections. I’ll keep an eye for a used one. Thanks for the thread link.
So I have a Rega Apollo CD player that I had thought I might upgrade to a Line Magnetic 515 CD player at some point for my desktop system. Art, am I interpreting your experience correctly that you think I might get better sound by using my Rega as a transport with a Border Patrol DAC (rather than going from the Rega to a Line Magnetic 515 CD player)? Or is it more just apples and oranges in your view? Thanks! Margot
Buy a DAC, I believe CD's are about to become quaint. Audio-gd sells direct and offers a large selection of quality gear, I have their DAC 19 based on the PCM 1704 chips. I have a $5,000 heavily modded CD player by Reference Audio Mods, even though it sounds better than my stand alone DAC, I end up using the DAC for convenince of playing the 300 CD's I have burned into ITunes.Just as my system was sounding perfect my CD player took a dump. It ain't just a CD player it's the beautiful Line Magnetic 515CD. This the second time and now it's out of warranty. I have over 4000 titles on CD and have no intention of ripping them to a hard drive. I have a small Luxman player as a backup but it's always had trouble reading discs. That leaves me with an Oppo BDP103. Obviously it sounds like ass compared to the LM so with a budget of about $1000 should I get a new CD player such as a Rega Apollo or should I use the Oppo as a transport and buy a DAC?
Buy a DAC, I believe CD's are about to become quaint. Audio-gd sells direct and offers a large selection of quality gear, I have their DAC 19 based on the PCM 1704 chips. I have a $5,000 heavily modded CD player by Reference Audio Mods, even though it sounds better than my stand alone DAC, I end up using the DAC for convenince of playing the 300 CD's I have burned into ITunes.
Their is a lot of controversy about the MQA format, but I would buy an MQA enabled DAC, if it had everything else that I wanted.
I good rule of thumb, spend 50% of your budget on a transport and 50% on the DAC. Following owner / designer of Audio-gd, I bought a $1,000 DAC to go with my factory maxed out MacBook Pro retina.