Higher End DACs

AtDavid (aka headaudio123 now, and a bunch of other aliases earlier): thank God we have you, your Majesty

And of course, nobody can pleasure you #measurementmorons. You ask for measurements, then when they are given to you, you spit things from your venomous mouth like it’s beyond humans hearing thresholds, test were not done right, controlled listening test with a certified panel of experts, blah, blah, blah

I guess engineers that design and build DACs, amplifiers, preamps, streamers, CD players, etc... never considered RF, EMI and other causes of distortion or interference that could pose problems they all assumed we would buy isolation boxes, rewire our homes, hook everything to batteries? I guess I must be lucky I have a modest system don't employ any of these things and somehow manage to stream and get at least to me excellent results. I also get great results from my CD player. Of course I keep any computers, routers, switches, NAS in a different room pretty good distance away. 

I wouldn’t pay a dime for the streaming function. In my case, my DAC is hooked to Volumio / Raspberry Pi. The web interface is well done. Under the hood, you have the standard MPD (Music Player Deamon) that you can control with any MPD client, be it on you cell phone or PC. All my music is FLAC based. I have a 4TB hard drive hooked to the Raspberry via USB and an NFS mounted drive to one of my file servers.

For budget (~ 1000$), i like the Rega DAC-R.

I listened to many DACs, i loved the Ayre QB-9 hooked to Krell KSA-100s, KRC-3 Preamp and Dynaudio Contour S 1.4. There are used QB9 to sell, they are usually bargain for what they offer. I don’t know about the new Ayre models.
The best DAC i heard was the Meitner MA-1.

@djones51It is some effort to design audio equipment on the first place,  and the product is made as an island. There. The specs are published as if the device wasn't connected to anything other than a power supply. 

When the device is connected to another device the abstract world of the original device no longer exists,  it's part of a system, connected to noise makers left and right  on just about an infinite scale of interfaces.

How the device now sounds can be totally different to what the designer had intended and blame for that is directed at the wrong component. 

DACs are so vulnerable,  since the ultimate output is the translation of the source and it's noise from power supplies, processors, cabling, the list goes on. The digital  chain is far too long and allows interference to readily transmit.

One user may praise the DAC while another is ready to throw it against a wall. I went through a similar process with the Curious cable. It was a disaster in my system, but others were fine.