I looked hard at the W4S DAC-2 before choosing the PWD. I was able to listen to one in a system, and thought it excellent. The praise in the 6Moons review and its TAS selection are well-merited. The pricing is excellent.
I suspect everyone here knows this, but use of an HDMI cable in the PWT/PWD, W4S, or
Sonore ecosystems is unrelated to the HDMI signal standard. The cable is just
a convenient physical medium. It's for I2S, and there is no HDMI conversion going on with the cable. The same is true with the fantastic Universal Player and DACs by MSBTech. Those devices use Cat 6 cable, but the signal has nothing to do with Ethernet. It's for I2S.
Either version of maintaining I2S straight from source to DAC strikes me as better than running through USB. And when using a transport, why do it any other way? If given an option with something like a network player, why not use it? Just no reason in my view to use USB unless there is no other choice, or the USB implementation is better than the BNC/optical/coax SPDIF input. Sometimes though, USB is the only choice. In such a situation, you definitely want an async USB DAC [Kenny's is good, but there are lots out now, and it only does USB, while costing about 70% of the cost of the W4S, which does a bit more; the Kenny is also portable, while the W4S really isn't], or a USB/SPDIF bridge to use with an otherwise musical DAC. Anyway, lots of choices for the USB approach, thank goodness.
Back to chalk's original question:
Quote:Need some opinions on what DAC would be ideal for the taboo and csp2+ combo. Anyone with any experience with the wyred 4 sound dac 2? Am thinking this would be a a good upgrade from the current musical fidelity v dac 2 i am currently using. Thanks!
What is your source material going to be? Transport? Hard drive? Desktop? Laptop? Etc. File types? Resolution? The sources will drive some of the answers for which inputs might matter to you, and once you get there, then the musical qualities of the DAC, its future upgrade-ability or expandability, your budget, might help narrow the list further.
There are so many great choices out there. And the downward pricing pressure is amazing. For example, I have a PS Audio DAL III, modded by Rick Cullen [Mod IV], and an Audiophileo Model 1, that all in cost me about $2800 just 4 years Sounds fantastic. I figure, if I am lucky, in today's market, I can maybe get $700 bucks for it as a highly musical async USB DAC with other inputs and outputs as well.