SW1X dacs

What’s the verdict then? Is this Sw1x DAC 3 balanced worth the money?

also what’s your experience with Audio Note DAC 5?

There is no answer to such a question. I can only speak for myself. It is an excellent DAC. My take on it seems to change day to day. Some days I am absolutely convinced there is no better digital to be had at any price. Other days it sounds just very good. I am now of the opinion that one "problem" with the DAC III B is that it accentuates the difference between good digital recordings and mediocre ones. I have been listeing to a fair amount of digital streamed with Qobuz lately and the variation in recording quality or perhaps the stream is again very high. The DAC II Special I owned before trading up struck me as being 95% as good and it too seemed to strike me differently on different days. This does not happen with my vinyl rigs. Sure, some days my hearing just sounds off. And crappy pressings do sound crappy. But for the most part my vinyl rigs never fail to please immensely. 
I listened to an Audio Note system at Axpona '19. I came back to that room over and over. I don't recall which DAC they had in the room but whichever model it was sounded amazing as did the entire system. 

How does SW1X DAC compare with Lampizator?

I had a SW1X DAC III + upgrades. Wasn’t impressed with it. I let it break in for 5 days straight. It was very muted and lifeless sounding to me. It sounded NOTHING like good analog.
I’ve also owned the Directstream DAC...also lacking in magic and very digital sounding.

The DAC that most sounded like a vinyl rig running a koetsu black (my preferred cartridge) was the Deja Vu Audio Aldo Dac. This dac was using a Sonos Connect as the Tidal source with a $700 digital coax cable.
The sound blew my mind. It was Psychedelic.

The performance of the SW1X DAC III Balanced will depend on what it is being fed. The designer, Slawa Roschkow, does not consider streaming a suitable source for any serious listening as it is rife with timing errors. Feed it a proper SPDIF signal from a CD Player or server and you will realize its inherent greatness. However, the only fair comparison is with other DACs.

Analog is another thing altogether. With an analog source there is no digital conversion either A to D or D to A where there will always be some loss.With analog it is simply necessary to get the signal that the cartridge generates to the preamp without screwing it up, and there lies the rub. What happens when a phono stage gets truly out of the way and delivers a really robust signal? If analog is your thing, the SW1X LPU III Balanced phono stage will knock socks off permanently.

So what's the deal with the usb input? Can't I just run USB cable from my computer and plug it directly into SW1X? If that's the case 'm not sure I've heard of such a thing at this day and age....