MHDT Orchid or Lampizator Amber 3?

I like that this thread ended up with people buying both dacs under consideration and everyone coming away ecstatic about their systems.  Good work.

Having a tonof experience modding products to get the most out of them 
the orchid has a lot of hidden potential just by upgrading all the white smoothing,
coupling caps . The Pogota is much better then the orchid it is a true 20 bit 
classic Burr Brown 1704 chipset and sounds very good . I have upgraded 2 of these and a orchid  changing the 6 white caps , upgrading the fuse is a dramatic upgrade , you can go even further upgrading the power supply caps many installing a all copper Furutech IEC input. We are talking over a 10% improvement across the board and comparison with dacs several times their cost 
the New Jolida Black ice  glass DSD with a few mods is a giant killer 
stock it won in a shoot out against several well known dacs . The mods are a big plus .

I have a maxed out Lampizator Amber 3 with totally upgraded bigger case .
no need to remove 16 screws and remove the whole case I set it up just slide off the top . I  put over $2300 in upgrades with tube rolling options and the best of the best  parts and wiring .i am upgrading to a modded Atlantic . Nothing under $6k is as musical or versatile as this dac and looks great.
it had stock 6x5 rectifier  tubes , I find the 6ax5 Tungsol or Amperex verygood. Upgrade. I  had added a 5 v transformer for Even better sound the great classic 5ar4 and currently using nos 1950 RCA 5U4G coke bottle smooth plates exceptional sound.
rectifier tubes and without question help to Taylor your system .

The Pagoda is not as good sounding as the Orchid to some ears. It is subjective for sure.  Many think the Orchid is the gem of the MHDT Dac line.  The upgrades I have done on the Orchid certainly increase the sound quality by at least 25-30%.  The key resistors are an important element in getting the most out of the Orchid. Agree on the fuse upgrade! 

I bet your modified Amber 3 sounds amazing! Hope the stock Amber 3 is as good as the upgraded Orchid units I have heard. We will see! I have high expectations and some of this is based on your comments audioman58. 

Several months ago, based in part on Terry Londons' recommendation, I purchased the MHDT Orchid dac with the WE tube upgrade. To give a system context, speakers are Audio Note AN/J LX, preamp is the STP SE/Stage 2, amp is a First Watt SIT 3. I use an Oppo BDP105 as a kind of server, with an external hard drive connected to it. I have purchased interconnects, special jumper cables, and a usb cable from Grannyring (Bill Dion). I have found his products to be exceptional value, and my experience in dealing Bill and communicating with him has been absolutely the best experience I have had in my over forty years of being into this hobby. So when I had the chance to have him modify my Orchid, I jumped at it. He replaced key resistors with Vishay Zfoils and Audio Note Tantalum non magnetics, and certain caps were replaced with Vcap Odams, and Vcap CuTFs. I just received the dac  from Bill yesterday. I believe it already had over 50 hours of burn in time, and I have been running it since receiving it as I am aware that these caps and resistors take some time to fully break in. But in listening today, I am a very happy camper. The sound stage has expanded, the noise floor reduced (eerily so), bass is deeper and better defined......it feels like one is that much closer to the musicians, the singers, the music, the emotions evoked. So much of what makes for better sound appears to be a kind of getting rid of what gets in the way. I can only assume that is at least in part what these upgraded components have done. There are two descriptors that kept coming to mind in trying to describe what I have been hearing with these upgrades: 'refined' and 'natural'. I have not heard the Lampizator Amber 3 so I cannot comment on a comparison.