I switched from Berkeley to PD MPS-5 earlier this year. First, I think Berkeley is an excellent unit and for the price, it is hard to beat and it was significantly better than my old DAC Esoteric D-05. Also, I supposed I never used it to its full potential as I am using ASR integrated amp so I never tried it connecting directly to amplifier which is supposed to be the best way to connect Berkeley.
However, in my system, PD improves upon Berkeley strenght in just about everyway. Berkeley weakness my system was its bass' tendency to be on the fat slow side. PD was much better in that respect. PD has as nice rich sounding mid range, a tad more forward than Berkeley but offer better detail and imaging and more open top. Berkeley sounds a bit darker in this respect. I can't tell if value wise it is worth 3x the price but adding a good transport and SACD capability, I consider it a good buy. I listen to my digital music mostly through a computer music server so the comment between Berkeley and PD was through the same server.
Jonathan, I wonder if you can elaborate the upcoming USB upgrade a bit more. I am in the process of auditioning Weiss INT202 to compare to my Lynx AES 16 card but it seems like I should wait to see what's going on with PD USB first.
