Absolute top tier DAC for standard res Redbook CD

I fully admit that I am excruciatingly patient when evaluating a component

I am too, and while the breakin thing sounds like witchcraft, its real in my experience as well. A lot of ADD audiophiles miss out on good gear due to the lack of patience...

In the course of breaking something in, over the subsequent several weeks or whatever I might change or add any number of things in the system, clean contacts, that sort of thing. There's no way I can track how the thing I'm breaking in is coming along. There's no way I'm going to listen for a bunch of capacitors to break in. The system sound changes constantly. Am I the only one who can't tell when something's finally broken in?

Break in real and patience is a must. 1200 hours is no longer break in, but other things factor in the day to day nuances of our systems.

Steve,
I for one believe that synthetic materials generally seem to require extended burn in time compared to the natural materials. I also share your impression that natural material products tend to sound better more often than not.

Matt,

You wrote, "I may try running it direct to amp if I decide to keep it, otherwise I will do the entire audition running it through my Criterion..."

From what I've read, I *strongly* recommend that you try running the DS direct to amp before making a final decision. You might want to thoroughly A/B direct versus the Criterion.

I know of a couple of people who have gone direct DS-to-amp and have declared it to be better than running through a pre.

In my own experience, I recently demoed an ARC Ref 5se between my PS Audio PWD II DAC and amp, and it was worse than terrible! Such a highly vaunted preamp, and yet the result was like taking 100 steps backward. Though we gave it a number of hours for testing, we knew within 30 seconds that it simply didn't work. (Great way to save $13K, to boot.)

I'm just concerned that if you don't try direct-to-amp, you may be missing something big in the DS.

Rob