THIS ISSUE: Technical Editor John Atkinson listens to the Benchmark DAC3 B and measures the Rotel DT-6000 CD Player.
BENCHMARK DAC3 B D/A PROCESSOR
After I read John Marks’s review of Benchmark Media Systems’ DAC1 D/A processor/headphone amplifier in the July 2003 issue of Stereophile, I bought a rack-mounted version to use for my on-location recording projects. I subsequently wrote, in a follow-up review,1 that the diminutive Benchmark “punched way above its weight. Its grain-free presentation was accompanied by stable, well-defined soundstaging, and low frequencies that, if not as weighty as [that of my reference, the 18×-the-price Mark Levinson No.30.6], were still full-balanced.”
Benchmark updated the DAC1 by adding a USB 1.1 port that could handle data with sample rates up to but for years I stuck with the original non-USB DAC1 as one of my daily drivers. The DAC1 now resides in our storage unit, as I have been using a succession of D/A processors that offer USB or Ethernet ports, reflecting my increasing use of a computer as the primary source of digitally encoded music.
