The best of the DACs

Sounds to me like you've got it all dialed in just right. Nothing left but to kick
back and enjoy. Cheers.

When it comes to audio.....I don't let DACs, transports or computers enter my listening room.
I am a strictly analogue (vinyl) buffoon.
But I just need to say that Mezmo's post is one of the most erudite, educated and convincing statement.....it has been my pleasure to read.

Memo, your post could be construed as a "bits are bits", source makes no difference. This is absolutely not the case. A cd player based system is usually synchronous, while pretty much all USB dacs are asynchronous. In practice, sometime fairly dramatic differences in sound quality are possible between the two, mainly because of differences between jitter levels of whatever device provides the master clock (which may be the cd player, a usb converter or the dac) in the architecture.

The other thing about CD players is you can get "bargins" on high end cd players, at least on the used market. So many people are moving to computer audio that it has becomes somewhat of a buyers market. So your dollar for performance may go a bit further with CD players over computer audio. Even so, I will never go back to cd players. I love the convenience of being able to choose whatever track I want from any album at anytime. Just use my ipad or iphone to select. No mess with disk, don't have to get up or anything.

Check out the Totaldac D1. Not cheap but so far nothing has beat it (from what I have read). Check out the mini review on 6 moons. I have no doubt it would sound way, way better than your Ayre (assuming you have a great computer audio set-up including cabling). You can also run it straight into your amps for even more pure sound.