Outboard DACs

Lavry DA11 Pro from start to finish, but does the sound really match up to the internet buzz? Lavry is a pro-audio company which shows little (if indeed any) sign of interest in the audiophile world, but that doesn’t stop the audiophile world being interested in Lavry. The company’s DA10 DAC became something of a cult success (HFC 341) and the DA11 builds on that success by adding a couple more features. The most immediately useful of those for most Hi-Fi Choice readers, we suspect, will be the USB input. It’s actually good for 96kHz sampling, though it may not work that way straight out of the box and Lavry’s recommendations for computer set up are worth following.

Forget the dystopian future of the movies, this Matrix offers a vision full of format-friendly functionality, where DACs, headphone amps and preamps live in perfect harmony

Moon 300D Externally, this is Moon at its most typically unpretentious, but is there a dark side? here’s seldom much about Moon products that stands out a mile externally – which is not to deny them their smart and individual appearance. This particular member of the team has a largely typical specification, with two coaxial and one optical S/PDIF inputs and a USB socket, while analogue output is available both balanced and unbalanced. Differences are more apparent inside the unit, where Moon has carefully separated analogue and digital parts of the equation. A digital circuit board, largely populated with surface-mounted components, receives the digital input, applies digital filtering and converts it to analogue, forwarding the output to an analogue board beneath.

Looking for a fully loaded streaming DAC? This flexible preamp could be the ultimate front end

NuForce DAC9 Well equipped and smart in a retro science fiction kind of way – flexible too! This isn’t the only DAC in the group to include a headphone output, but it makes more of a point of it than most, and fair enough, adding as it does a dedicated volume control and both flavours of headphone jack, 6. 3mm (quarter-inch) and 3. 5mm. The latter, incidentally, also functions as an input, an optical digital input to be precise, in similar manner to some computer sound cards and portable audio devices.

Perfect PC partner Pro-Ject’s £140 DAC Box is a no-brainer for anyone playing music from a computer, says HFC’s technical consultant Richard Black A long the way, Pro-Ject Audio has managed to get some quite impressive functions into small spaces in its Box Audio series of components. A DAC – even a three-input one – is not quite such a shoehorn feat and, indeed, this is by no means the smallest on the market. It’s stoutly made, with a steel sleeve over a steel tray which houses the electronics assemblies. The component count is low, with a DAC chip, an S/PDIF receiver and a USB receiver, plus a minimum of housekeeping parts and a handful of power supply components.