Teac DAC

[seacard]

Well, seems like I've been gone way too long, but I guess nobody missed me either here or on Headfi. Oh well.

Anyway . . . looking for a cheap DAC/Headphone amp for my office. I've had plenty of nice ones that I liked (Bryston, Benchmark, etc.) but would like to get decent quality, and a built-in headphone amp. I know in the upper end, there are some good candidates -- Benchmark, Lavry, Grace, Mytek. But what about in the $500 range or below? I researched and researched, and came across the Teac UD-H01. So, at the risk of asking a stupid, headfi-like question, is this thing any good? I mean, I want cheap, but I don't want to crappy. All the buzzwords seem to be there: 192, asynchronous, etc. I've brought a pair of K701s to the office, and am streaming the Naxos Music Library straight from my computer, and it sounds . . . meh. Hoping a DAC/Headphone Amp will take it up a few notches.

And if this isn't the holy grail, feel free to tell me what is.

[grawk]

buy it and let us know

[seacard]

Gotcha -- will do (if I can find one in the U.S., that is). I just wasn't sure if I was missing something obviously horrendous about its design since I'm not a techie.

[Filburt]

At least on cursory glance, I can't really find much more information other than that it uses a tenor usb controller, pcm1795s, and an asrc. I don't know if it's 'obviously horrendous' but it isn't 'obviously innovative', for that matter. I'm not a big fan of this approach (i.e. reclocking and resampling using an ASRC), but it's serviceable. It probably sounds fine; most things sound at least OK nowadays. IC and app note development has advanced to that point. It's kind of hard to say much more without more details about the design.

Edited September 1, 2011 by Filburt