Mechans: Thanks for your detailed explanation. I'm a poor music lover, always looking for budget gears, indeed I already found my audio nirvana with JDS Labs ODAC > Class D Audio 400C power amp > Wharfedale Denton 80th Anniversary speakers, this combination is musical enough to bring tears and joys when I'm listening, just that I'm trying to seek some dynamic improvements, though I'm not used to giant size of floor stander speakers due to immobility of moving those. I got an refurbished NAD 3020i, though I was trying to use it as preamp, it does not sound clear enough to me, and I found that I dun like to put preamp + poweramp as 2 blocks of big gears, in the end still prefer without preamp, control volume from computer DAC volume, this sound best to me.