Jump in now or wait?

I currently have the DAC 1 PRE and can say it is a very nice unit and simple to set up and use.

Walter, I would suspect the DAC's in the AMR 777 to be a step up, and should be for the like seven times price difference!

The DAC 1 is a solid and very musical DAC with clear and extended highs that are not harsh. when compared to my Esoteric DV-50s, it didn't have quite the soundstage or air, but was very listenable to, and did a great job even with high bit rate MP3's.

Herman - no, the reads from the hard drive should be error-free. Its the spooling from memory out to the device that has no error correction.

Steve N.

Steve - Hmm. Thought I had this figured out. Will there be a problem going from pc using usb to DAC1 due to this memory spooling issue?

I still don't get it. I'm not saying you are wrong, but I've been involved with electronics and computers for a long time and this is news to me. Perhaps I don't understand what you mean but it seems to me that if computers generated errors reading from memory and transferring the data nothing would ever work.

I came very close to going for a PC-type source a few months ago, in part b/c I kept hearing that you could get better sound than out of a CD player. But the thought of having to learn a bunch of new technology, load up a bunch of my CDs, etc., etc., knowing all the while that (a) I don't enjoy technology for technology's sake, and (b) something super duper and newer would be no doubt be coming down the pike in a few years anyway, caused me to decide to go "backwards" and try a tube CD player with a good reputation--so I bought an EAR Acute CD player, and am quite liking it. And I'm really thrilled not to be worrying about all this new technology...yet!