At first, it was becoming quite a chore to find DACs that had digital bypass / digital passthrough so that I could pass the digital signal onto my pre-pro. However, after some intensive searching across the web including many of the trusted audiophile marketplace sites like MusicDirect, Audio Advisor, Crutchfield, OneCall, and more, I’ve been able to amass a pretty good listing of DACs that fit the requirements.
I’ve made it a point to keep the original post updated with any new DACs that I’ve come across. So be sure to view the original post here as it has all the updates. Right now, I’ve been able to come up with a listing of 11 DACs that have digital passthrough. They range from $59 all the way to nearly $4,000!
I’m glad that so many options have come to light. Right now, I’m certainly the poor audiophile. Even $600 is really stretching it so I’m ideally looking for a DAC with digital passthrough for around $250-$300 or so max.
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| The Matrix Mini-i DAC is a balanced DAC and has S/PDIF out and can be found for as low as $319 online. |
I’m going to keep researching some low cost options that I may have missed and go from there.
One more to add to the list appears to be the AMI Musik DDH-1 DAC. It has Toslink out.
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| The AMI Musik DDH-1 has toslink optical out. The price hasn’t been formally announced but is supposed to be around $450 or so. |
