Sub-￡1000 outboard DACs

摘要

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the hi-fi industry was awash with external DACs. And for good reason: CD player quality was, if we are being honest, variable. Some players were very good, some were dreadful and most were somewhere in between. Adding a separate digital converter helped improve the lot of most players of the time. Then suddenly, how the CD transport was synchronized to the digital converter became all-important; some DAC manufacturers began to include secondary clock connectors and others began to reclock the signal as it reached the DAC box. But this - coupled to improved digital conversion systems that happily worked inside a one-box player - began to make the DAC's place in the hi-fi chain look tenuous. One by one, manufacturers quietly dropped their digital converters. The external DAC never quite went away, though. Some of the earliest DAC brands (eg, Arcam) backed out of the external processor market, while others, including PS Audio and Musical Fidelity in this test, stayed true to the cause. And now, although the market for external DACs is still relatively small and specialised, the concept is once more growing in popularity.