Denafrips 12 anniversary

@alerrico I have the Venus II dac. It is very close to the "Original" Terminator. Alvin Chee said as much. I also have a local friend that had a Pontus II, then a Venus II. He said the Venus was very good. His father bought a Weiss 501 and handed down to him the Terminator version 1 and he told me that they are VERY close. So the Venus is probably very good for the money. I really like mine in my $60K system. It holds it’s own. I hope this helps.

Odioifyly:

So one is made in China and the other in Germany.  The Denafrips is an R2R ladder DAC which is much more expensive to manufacture and provides the sound I seek on my reference system.  If you love your RME great.  It does not provide the SQ I Seek.  If you want an American made DAC look at the Schiit models. They offer Multi-bit designs that are one step down from true R2R designs.  My desktop DAC/AMP for headphones is a Schiit Jontunheim and I am very pleased with it for the price.  

My self hav8ng heard a ton of dacs being in New England within 3 hours of5 states and audio get together slots of great electronics ,

to be very honest the T+A 200 dac by many people have bested dacs at $14 k

and it is $7k if you use HQ player,which it has modes built in to mesh well with a Roons build in HQ player option it gets better still.

I am currently saving for this , yes it is better in most every respect to the Holosprings may KTE,or terminator+ 12 anniversary by the fast majority 

this too includes the mola mola ,and Dave dac in the upper $$ range , I was shocked considering the Holo, and Denafrips are 40+ lbs vs 16lbs of the T+A  just a ton of cutting edge technologies.