Chord Dave

Having owned the DAVE/Blu2, I doubt it would be "thicker" than what you have. It has many strengths - forensic detail being one of them - but it is quite lean sounding and somewhat thin. Claims by Chord fanboys should be treated with scepticism, particularly when you're spending this much money.

I haven't heard the Bartok so don't know how it compares.

My audio pal just got a Dave and in a short period of time, thoroughly prefers it to his fully upgraded Denafrips Terminator.  Now that I am a pensioner, I think I will content myself with the performance of my Ayre Codex.  My upgrade from 4 different ~$1K DACs to the Ayre QB-9 and then the Codex offered a huge improvement in SQ in my system.  In fact, when I got the QB-9, I sold my SOTA Sapphire TT and never looked back. 

@ whitestix

Have your pal try Hugo Mscaler on Dave!

He will be surprised at how much more details and extension are available.

Thomas

Trusted member looking for a demo/hangout with a Dave... 
Anyone in the Indianapolis area with a Chord Dave DAC wanna bring it over to a pretty good system and room, drop me a message. Or if you know of one around here, let them know. 

After 2 years owning the Dave I finally tried to go singleended (rca) from Dave to Diablo. Quite a step up. Then I changed Dave to preamp mode and set input 3 in Diablo to AV - connection, thus skipping the Diablo preamplifier. This also a step up and now I really understand how good the Dave is. Should have done it long ago.
The conversion in Dave from unbalanced to balanced is not good enough. Better to use singleended. 
I moved the xlr-cables from Dave to the Scorpio cd-player, so going directly to Diablo. But it doesn’t provide the rhythm, attack, speed and 3-d like the Dave does. 
Thomas