good source for a pearl lite and R500 set

[roberto]

I’m in the market for a good source for my set.

Currently I own a Marantz Pearl Lite with Kef R500 speakers, and i’m really happy with the sound.

At the time I needed to save a little more before buying a good source (currently I have an old Pioneer dvd player and an Eminent mediaplayer). The Pearl Lite SA player would be a good source, but I don’t listen to cd’s that much and own no SACS’s.

Ideally I would like a source to replace them both, 1 unit for playing cd’s, mp3’s, FLAC’s, and divx/mkv files, and if the unit can be used as a DAC it would be a big plus. But I can live with 2 units if that is the best solution.

I’ve been searching for some time know and I’m looking for some advice:

What I found so far is that there are two ways to go:

Buy a decent DAC/streamer and a universal player like the Panasonic DMP-BDT500

Buy a good universal player like the Cambridge Audio 752BD. (The Oppo 105 costs €1700 euro’s in my country which is too much, the UD7007 doesn’t play FLAC files from usb media, does not support NTFS disks so HQ mkv movies, > 4Gb will not be playable and doesn’t have a smartphone app.)

What can you recommend as a decent DAC to match my set? Will one like the Arcam rdac do justice the system?

Would it be better to have a separate DAC/Streamer (like the stream magic 6) for music and a UP for movies? The Marantz NA7004 is also an option but I’m afraid it will not get the best out of my system and the remote control app seems to be a bit of a joke.

The total budget is €1200.

Any advice will be welcome!

 

[CnoEvil]

Linn Sneaky DS would be my choice.

 

[BigH]

The CA752 already has 5 decent dacs inside it, no need for additional dacs?

 

[roberto]

CnoEvil – I didn’t know about the Linn Sneaky DS, it seems like a nice product but it adds one more box to the pile as it only plays music through DLNA, I would prefer a device that can play media via USB disks. The price is also a bit steep, €1200 so that’s the total budget.

BigH – The CA752 should have a decent DAC and it is on my short list of players I want to audition soon.

Are there other recommendations I could try out?

 

[andrew_cawood]

I've been thinking about the same recently for my setup. Currently I'm using synology 212j>mf vlink 192>audiolab mdac>mf m3i>kef r100 which is great for the most part but not entirely happy with dsaudio/synology as the player - issues with gapless playback and it won't play 24bit music since neither the vlink or the mdac is recognised by the synology unit (I checked with support and dacs needs to be tested and added to their approved list of devices otherwise will just play 16bit).

bit of an aside but as a result I've looked into other options quite a bit, given your budget the Cambridge audio stream magic would seem to be the best fit. You could also consider a second hand naim unitiqute using its preouts - the price of these on eBay has really tumbled recently.