Msb dacs why not alot of postings

It's disheartening to read so many negative comments about MSB from folks who've never even heard it. The reality is - with most things in life you get what you pay for. That plus diminishing returns is why top performance cars, audio gear, etc. are expensive. I rank MSB as one of the best along with TotalDAC, Aries Cerat and a handful of others which I've heard. My taste lends towards a detailed non - fatiguing effortless DAC which is why I picked the Aqua Formula along with the matching LinQ streamer. Not the best but quite good IMO. 

@sbonamo,

I have been eyeing the LinQ server for a while. Can you operate LinQ by its proprietary app or you must subscribe to Roon to operate the LinQ? 

in any product development there are two important frontiers

1 - at any cost, advance performance, define state of the art
2 - bring excellent performance to more users at a price many users can easily afford

for those of us who enjoy this hobby, we also want to know the absolute performance gap between 1 and 2, then we calibrate and decide what we want to buy on the value vs performance curve

for me personally - i cannot and do not speak for anyone else - i think 1500-2000 bucks for a dac is a sweet spot - really excellent sound can be gotten, rivaling excellent analog systems (which i also fortunate to have) - i have tried many dacs now, some quite expensive ones well above this price tier, thus the basis for my belief

i could spend 10x that amount, affordability is not an issue, but for me, i would rather save the money, spend it on something else, and/or give to charities i support - no we can’t take the money with us when we pass, but even so, i would rather use the money for other things to improve my life and other peoples lives in ways that have more meaning and impact

@lalitk,

The LinQ has no interface, you simply turn it on and it acquires and IP address and is available as a Roon device ready to stream. As you probably already know, it has modular "cards" if you will with ROON, DLNA and HQPlayer currently supported. So if you only have the ROON card, yes you need to subscribe to ROON to connect and stream through it. I will tell you that it's quite revealing and I found that the design is very sensitive to footers, as much if not more so than my amps. Compared to the streamer boxes and gadgets (Sonores, SOTMs with LPSUs) the LinQ is simply in another league.  
 

@lalitk Please do post a review thread if you do try the LinQ. I'm interested in trying some new streamers too.