california audio labs sigma ii

A

alexg5775

New Member
I am looking for a DAC to use between my mac book and my fisher 500C and khorns. Someone locally is selling this DAC for 200$. It is a tube DAC. Does any one have any experioenc with this DAC. I have a 300$ budget so also open to other suggestions?

Thank you,

Alex
 
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not sure if you can get these where you are but the musical fidelity v dac ii is a good little bit of kit and it also has a usb input and is upgradable later with a matching power supply it's also in your budget brand new. hope this helps
 
I ran one for a coupla months back in the late 90's - very warm,smooth and totally lacking in detail vs the cheap DAC's built into mid-fi 21st century CD players. You can do a lot better for a lot less. Digital playback has really come a long ways in the past 10 years, this coming from an old analog only dinosaur.
 
I have the CAL Audio Sigma II DAC and it is fantastic. As long as you don't need to convert above 16/44.1. I auditioned a few $1000+ dacs a few months ago and none of them could best the CAL on 16/44.1 material. With a good NOS tube it can easily hold it own against much more modern dacs. Of course if you have a large amount of high resolution files the CAL is not for you. At $200 it is a good deal.
 
I have the Alpha version and what it does is show every limitation of your CD player/transport. I've had to put away a couple of disks that just sound flat. A good source will sing, but the Cal Audio DAC will show every poorly produced fault on the disk.

Good luck.
 
Got 2. Like anything else, subjective to your system, tastes, etc. I like mine a lot. Very smooth, non-fatiguing sound. Last word in detail, probably not. System dependent, very. Listenable, very. I wouldn't sell mine for $200.

Thanks,
Andy
 
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