> A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. Actually I'm rather fond

> A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. Actually I'm rather fond of the $80 SDAC and it stands tall among other, more expensive stuff I have (I'm listening to it as type this in fact). It's miles ahead of any CD player DAC. Seriously, a CD transport into a cheap DAC will sound very noticeably better. Admittedly I've only sampled about a dozen or so supposedly good players and eventually lost interest so it's not a big sample pool. I'm with you in that I also agree that it's dumb how most amplitude-signal DACs market "32bit/768khz" despite that sample rate being effectively useless and the noise floor in DS chips being at around ~20 bits worth of resolution and that's a best case scenario. edit: honestly when it comes to amps and dacs, in my experience, there is no spec or measurement that correlates with how good it sounds so with those I pretty much gave up on anything other than my ears.