Soooo many choices.

I was able to have a nice extended listen with my wife (much better ears) a couple weekends ago and we listened to several DACS (peachtree iDac, rega dac, Ayre QB9, Mcintosh d100, and one ohter that escapes me) and what really surprised me was that with everything but the dac identical the dac to dac difference was plain as day. Other surprises were that with a "modest" system composed of a mac mini (ammara), rega brioR amp, some kind of speaker cables :) and peachtree D5 speakers we could easily tell differences in several different aspects of the music. Takeaway for me was that you owe it to yourself (I wont say you need to because you dont) to listen to as many as possible with music that is representative of yours (quality included). For me the enjoyment did not track with the cost as I had expected walking in. I dont really understand component karma but that system liked a couple of the units, treated one poorly, and made one almost difficult to listen to. all music was ripped lossless 16/44 while I was there with DBpoweramp.

Wow, I didn't want to hear that. I may have the option to hear 2 DAC's near me is all. The likelihood of them being in the feature group I want is poor, the quality level and feature group, next to nothing.

Dodggitter - currently , 764 is close to the top for consumer product - commercial may go higher

File size becomes a factor - 24/192 files can start around 250-350 Bytes an go up from there - I've seen some downloads over 1 gig.

My plan is to stop at 24/192 - if I want higher - I switch to vinyl

Paulsax hit the nail on the head - price is not an indicator of how good your ears tells you a component sound

Dragon1952 auditioned the Gungnir and preferred the NuWave. I heard the Bifrost and it sounded better than Wadia chord and Mytek in the $1300_$1700 range - to my ears

Different ears, differing preferences, in different systems

This hobby has never been black and white, but sometimes the shades of gray can overwhelm.

Hmm. My mid-length goal is upgrade amp and preamp after the DAC. That's going to mean lots more changing components around then in trying to find sound I like. That's what I was trying to avoid by getting better/more expensive gear.

BTW that should have said 250-350 Mbytes - but I hope the later ref to 1 gig made that apparent.

If it were me I'd do the pre-amp and amp upgrade before the DAC - get them settled first. You may find the DAC is not a good match to the pre-amp.

What do you have currently?