bereford dac

[gover1]

hi, am looking at buying a berefore tc-7510 dac which i can get my hands on for under £100. any search for this dac on the internet for this dac will imediatly bring you up against a huge amount of controversy between positive reviewers and claims of advertisement. I thought i woud head over here as these forums tend to be fairly level headed firstly i would like to know whether it is thought to be a reasonable dac by people, and secondly whether it is likely to benefit from upgraded caps etc like my xcanv2 certainly did. if so what to change? i can follow instructions with a soldering iron but thats about the limit of my ability. thanks in advance for any help

[xerxes]

How about Monica?

I have one of these, I built it into a case with a headphone amplifier which you can see in this thread: rockgrotto.proboards39.com/index.cgi?board=m&action=display&thread=1158074744. A search of the interweb will throw up a good few links to some reviews.

My own experience was that I prefered the sound using the internal DAC in my Cyrus CD8x CD player with PSX-R power suppy to the sound using the CD8x as a transport with the Monica 2 DAC. But it was very close, I even compared a cheap £40.00 DVD player with the Monica 2 to my CD8x/PSX-R comibination and it was equally close. Considering the DVD player, Monica 2 combination cost around £150.00 all up and the Cyrus player and PSU costs around £1400.00, I thought it was pretty impressive. In addition, the Monica 2 sounded better than the Cyrus with certain music, acoustic music and vocals are very nice with the Monica 2, whereas I felt the Cyrus player had more punch and impact with rock and pop and the bass wass a little tighter.

All in all, I think the Monica 2 DAC is excellent value for money, although once you include shipping, a case and a power supply it will likely come in over your £100.00 budget.

[rickcr42]

To my knowledge the DAC uses a Wolfson DAC chip and my understanding is the Wolfsons are Signa-Delta DAcs while the so called "audiophile" DAC all use the old R-2R DAC architecture (some of the new BB's are a sorta kinda melding of the two) which are deamed to sound better all things being equal.

The REASON is the Delta-Sigmas are self contained which means the analog stage and initial analog filter are internal thus anything you do after will be effected by the norammly impossible to bypass internal analog stage.

This is why the single most effective mod of CD players using such DAC chips is to eliminate everything after the DAC and replace it with a single high quality DC blocking capacitor which is direct coupled right to the output jacks making the best of a bad situation

[gover1]

hi, sorry for it being a while since i last posted. decided to get a beresford as it wasnt to expensive and see what it was like. im no audiophile reviewer but am pretty happy with this bit of kit. it is definetly better than the built in sound on my laptop and is comparable to the sound of my nad cd player, so for the money has done the job, also gives my quad fek set up a bit of a kick up the arse in the base area , base now seems less flabby. anyway, just a few thoughts, cheers for your help, mark
p.s will give monica and charlize a bash in the summer when i got some time and money on my hands