DACs: Burmester vs. Meitner vs. dcs

6 months?!? You're being a little minimalistic :-)
No, not delusional, just just spuriously optimistic LOL
Really, I hope it goes smoothly and expeditiously for you, I wouldn't wish my experience on even my worst enemy:JT notwithstanding :-) My contractor had also done huge multimillion dollar jobs. But, as yours indubitably will, thought that acoustical measurements and sticking to them was, well, ridiculous. How can a foot or so here or there effect the sound?!? My advice: stay on them, and see what they are going to do BEFORE they do it, so as not to have to UNDO it and do it again. Know the prints well, weedhopper. It's a painful but ultimately worthwhile process. Oh, and expensive. I'll be out when it's done. I may be much older then :^)

i have already found a discrepency between a measurement that my contrator gave the acoustical designer and one's i had given them (3 times). they started designing for the wrong height. i caught it by asking questions (which, as an anal SOB, i do constantly). we will see who tries to pin the wasted design time on who. the acoustical designer didn't consult the measurements i had provided him and the contractor had miss-communicated the height.

i have used this contractor for 20 years on 10 or so projects....he is a good guy and knows his stuff but it is my responsibility to make sure i get what i want. as long as i am clear on the design.....it will be right.

i appreciate that i get the benefit of the learning curves here.

I talked to EMM Labs about running a Placette passive volume control and they did not reccommend it. It's not a sufficient current output and the signal would be out of balance regarding tone.

Again, the DCS gear is optimized for direct connection to an amp. Pass Labs D-1 and the DCS are the only ones I've personally heard that will actually drive any length of cable and sound top notch. Camelot Uther is anothernice one I heard but lower on the food chain. As an example, I bouhgt the Marantz SA-1 when it first appeared. I was all excited because I could take that big balanced output (6 volts ) and use a Placette (I'm a big fan of pasive pre-amps and volume controls) volume control. It sounded awful. The 6 volts wasn't optimised for driving an amp same as EMM.

Sm2727, you can add the Audio Synthesis DAX Discrete as another digital component that sounds great straight into an amp, even through a lengthy interconnect. I have had mine connected with 50' Mogami Neglex microphone cables with truly great results. My DAX Discrete has the balanced differential output option.