Rsbeck, the apogee is a fine DAC, from all I've heard. But, I don't think it is in the same league as the Hbrandt's $14K dCS stack. While apogee is forward thinking in incorporating USB into the box, there are very high end DACs that don't--the U24 and M-Audio pieces work well in those applications. You may want to try a Waveterminal for your application. I didn't think the stock Transit/Sonica family sounded that great compared to some other pieces, but they still sounded pretty darn good with decent source material, so I still don't understand why you had bad results. Maybe a bad unit?
As an oddball sidenote, I had my g/f close her eyes and played some short clips from the same song through iTunes. One an uncompressed .wav file ripped with EAC. The other was a derivative mp3 created with LAME using the "alt preset extreme" VBR setting--a *very* high quality mp3 that I've heard many say is overkill. Yet, she was able to clearly ID the .wav as "sounding fuller" and "better"--notwithstanding the fact that she has significant hearing loss.
