Word of a warning - Benchmark is not a warm sounding DAC. According to John Siau it was meant to be neutral because warm sound (exaggerated even harmonics) sounds wonderful with voice or guitar but not with instruments that have more complex harmonic structure than simple overtones (like piano or percussion instruments)
Interesting comment. FWIW I noticed an improvement in percussion and piano with the DAC1 versus standard low end Sony CDP. Vocals also sounded thinner and more articulate with the DAC1.
I prefered the more natural sound of the DAC1 (more natural to my ears - especially for cymbals and piano) but a friend of mine (given an hour of blind A/B testing) prefered the regular CDP sound with thicker vocals but less realistic cymbals. Of course, he thought the organic thicker sound without the DAC1 was more realistic for vocals.
I was able to accept hearing exaggerated vocal articulation due to the singer using a microphone in the recording process and get past this reality and still enjoy the music whilst my friend found it intrusive (too evident that we were listening to a recording).
Certainly - it is a very subjective subject! And what I describe above was extremely subtle and NOT evident on every recording... on some recordings we were unable to tell which was the source. It suggests that you need to listen to a wide variety of music and recordings in order to make a full comparison and it inevitably requires some compromise. To me the greater the precision the more problems/anomalies you discover in your recording collection.