Chord Dave or Ayre QX5 Twenty DAC???

Personally I think the Chord Dave is overpriced.  I heard one through very nice headphones at the recent Bristol exhibition.  No doubt it sounded good but so did the new Sony Dac at a fraction of the price. 

A shame really cos Sony in 2017 has not got the perception of making genuine High End gear but they do.

I've always wanted to hear their high end stuff, but never seen it even at the Sony stores. 

Has anyone tried the Ayre with headphones directly or through the analog outputs into a high-end headphone amp? Thanks.

Why would anyone use another HP amp with it?  It's the best HP amp I've ever used. I've heard it balanced once as I don't personally have balanced cables yet for my IEM's, but I love it though the single ended jack.  They took painstaking time and effort to make the amp and they had nearly carte blanch when designing it.  It's truly a word class HP amp that eventually should get it's due.  The Codex has a really nice HP amp, but this one is leaps and bounds above that.  I like it much better than any of the Woo amps, that I feel are very good amps.  

Just found out the Ayre QX5 Twenty is releasing an update this week with full MQA decoding & I just bought the Dave and an Aurender. Oh well, I hope I am happy with that, could have saved money though.