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.