Soix and Essrand,
I have owned a lot of DACs. Most are overrated -- and overpriced. Harley makes you think you died and went to heaven with the Berkeley series 1. Don't believe everything you read. Reading between the lines is very useful. But letting your ears be the judge is the most important thing, of course.
The NAD M51 is a sleeper -- very much under the radar, IMO. It easily beats a lot of higher priced DACs. It beats the Berkeley in sheer musicality. If you want to break it down into parameters then that includes detail/definition, tonality, transparency, dynamics, sound stage and imaging. But you do need to get your cabling right. The sound can vary greatly depending on the cables you use. One might ascribe certain attributes to a component that actually belong to the cables that are attached to that component.
I have owned a lot of DACs. Most are overrated -- and overpriced. Harley makes you think you died and went to heaven with the Berkeley series 1. Don't believe everything you read. Reading between the lines is very useful. But letting your ears be the judge is the most important thing, of course.
The NAD M51 is a sleeper -- very much under the radar, IMO. It easily beats a lot of higher priced DACs. It beats the Berkeley in sheer musicality. If you want to break it down into parameters then that includes detail/definition, tonality, transparency, dynamics, sound stage and imaging. But you do need to get your cabling right. The sound can vary greatly depending on the cables you use. One might ascribe certain attributes to a component that actually belong to the cables that are attached to that component.