Have a Teac 701t transport and Innuos Zen-NG. I preferred to listen to physical media and my owned ripped cd’s. Lina a good pairing?
Hi Anthony, I don’t know what you are really looking for here. LINA is a great DAC that shares much of the Varèse DNA as you’ll see in this tear-down video. As with all our DACs it isn’t “voiced” so it is pretty neutral. Were you thinking of any aspect in particular? Might help to be a bit more specific…
Thanks for the response. I guess what I am trying to determine is which streamer as the Innuos and Lina have one will provide the better performance? Again, not primarily want to stream as the transport and ripped cd’s are what I mainly find superior . I use streaming for convenience. The transport would connect to the Lina DAC but my Teac 701 has one connection via coax. So is that a good match or is the Lina primarily for network streaming I guess is one of my questions. wanting best of both worlds I guess
The streaming subsystem in the LINA is the same as the one in all our DACs up to and including Vivaldi and as well as providing you with good sound quality it can be enhanced further with the addition of a Master Clock (which the Innuos can’t). The LINA should of course allow any CD Transport to perform at its best (although only a few have word clock inputs which enable them to benefit from an optimized dCS clocking regime).
That said, to me there is an obvious solution to your use case, but it may not be what you want to hear.
A Rossini Player would offer:
- An optimized CD-playing solution
- A significant sound quality lift compared to LINA
- A first rate streamer
…all in one box. In addition it would leave the door open to a further improvement with the addition of a Master Clock somewhere down the line.
Certified Pre-owned Rossinis (which carry a dCS-backed 18-month warranty) are available for less than $20k. (for instance this one) which whether you compare new-new or used-used is way less than the LINA/TEAC/Innuos.
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