So it's been a long whole since my post but here is some background to my statement. The QB-9 was a demo unit so fully broken in. The computer was a MBP with flash drive and 8 g of memory. The program was channel D pure music playing 24bit 192khz files, connected via toslink. Pretty sure the Dac had everything it needed to perform at its best and was NO WHERE NEAR the C5xeMP in the exact same system. My opinion