Well the Lynx AES16 is digital in and digital out, so I will need external DACs.
Yes, is about he same as the RME AES32. Somebody says that RME has better clock (in case your dac has a wordclock out, slaving the transport almost always has a very positive impact).
However I wouldn't spend more than $1500 per 2 channels. I wold never use a DAC that sits in a computer. However I also don't think we really need $5000-1000 DACs for 2 channels either. The actual DAC chips today perform much better than they did even 2 years ago.
While I agree with you in general about the prices of highend gear today (it is minimum 3x overpriced), there are exceptions (which i call the best buy products), there is diy, where there is almost no markup.
Building a state of the art dac is really expensive and much more difficult than building a preamp or a power amp. I reasearched the matter for two years and you couldnt have guessed that
99,9% of the products out there do one thing or the other NOT in the best possible way. Wether is the digital input, or the clock, or the dac chip, or the output stage, or the psu, or the volume control. Astonishing but true.
I didn't build my own because -thanks gods- somebody else at last did all things right, Peter (or i hope so becuse i havent checked the very last version, and the final one is not ready yet)
Now, your figure is quite close to the COST of building a state of the art DAC. If you look at the pricing of Peter's NOS1, its a little more than that for 4 channels. And he spent several thousand euros on equipment, R&D and dealing with suppliers. He will make the ROI maybe after selling a thousand pieces
But in the hifi world, the really good DACs can be counted with the fingers of one single hand and are all over 3000€ for 2 or more channels. Adding channels it's a minor addition to the overall cost (good for us).
