DAC3 - Bench Test - John Atkinson, Stereophile

DAC3 HGC - "All I can say is 'Wow!'"

"The Benchmark DAC3 offers extremely low levels of harmonic distortion from all its outputs. Intermodulation distortion was similarly vanishingly low."

"The Benchmark DAC3 featured extraordinarily low levels of analog noise at its outputs."

"No power-supply–related spuriae can be seen, and the random noise floor lies below –160 dBFS!"

"With its very low noise floor and correspondingly very high resolution, the DAC3’s reproduction of an undithered 16-bit tone at exactly -90.31 dBFS was perfect."

"When the DAC3 decoded dithered 16-bit and 24-bit data representing a 1 kHz tone at -60 dBFS, the increase in bit depth dropped the noise floor by more than 30 dB, indicating that the Benchmark’s resolution is at least 21 bits."

"This as good as a DAC can currently get!"

"Channel separation via the digital inputs was superb, at 124dB in both directions at 1kHz, and was still almost 110dB at 20kHz."

"The analog inputs offered a very wide frequency response that was not affected by reducing the load impedance from 100k ohms to 600 ohms or by varying the volume-control settings.The channels were superbly matched, both dropping by only 2dB at 200kHz."

"As with its predecessor, the DAC2 HGC, which Erick Lichte reviewed for Stereophile in February 2014, Benchmark’s DAC3 HGC offers state-of-the-art measured performance."

"All I can say is 'Wow!'" - John Atkinson

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