Seeburk,
I'm officially calling "the emperor has no clothes" on the Minimax Plus. It's a fine DAC, but really no better than many others overall. I feel that most people don't have the chance to compare these DACs against others in a conclusive way. Listening in a showroom is a tough call to say the least. DAC's are so close in performance 95% of the time that your audition can be effected by hundreds of factors, any one of which can lead to a happy, but misguided decision.
My friend sold his Minimax Plus and switched to the Rega. Though there was an element to the tube stage of the EE we did not like, the issue was so small I did not consider the upgrade (or sidegrade!) to the Rega worth the effort of swapping. He doesn't agree.
He borrowed better tubes, went with no tube in SS mode and so on. Too much trouble (for him) when the Rega sounded closer to his turntable rig, but he admits that most people laughed when he switched between the EE and his ARC DAC. They were that close!
Now....The Dacmagic is a bit brighter with a bit more glare perhaps and the soundstage is SLIGHTLY smaller, but it produces HIGH END digital sound when mated to a Mac Mini. Depending on the system some might even find the Dacmagic better than more expensive units. It's very lively sounding and it can be tweaked to sound even better.
Let's also consider this. The reputation of these units IS effected by their availability. The harder it is to find and hear, the more likely that it gets bigger user raves. I've seen this again and again. The EE Plus is harder to hear than the Rega. The Rega is more readily available than the Dacmagic and so on. This effects the public perception of these units more than you might think. Our disappointment in the EE Minimax plus was amplified because I perceived it as more of a "audiophile" product than the Rega. It's harder to get, has a tube and so on. But the Rega was better in most absolute terms.
I have a fairly revealing system with Merlin TSM-MXr speakers and a Manley Stingray II tube amp. I can easily hear differences in PC's, cables and most sources. But DAC's show a smaller range of audible differences than any of them. As I said before, change the amp or pre and you have a huge difference, but this is not the case with good DACs, where you end up comparing apples to VERY slightly different apples! People will pay big for those differences, but I think in many cases that money could go into another part of the system and yield a far better sonic return. No doubt some will differ with me and that's fine, but make the effort to explore on your own. In the end your opinion and satisfaction will be the only thing that matters.
Cheers & happy new year!
Rob