HI Dan, nice to make your acquaintance. I must first say that I'm listening to the Elgar with the upsampling. I don't realy know how thta will compare with the Delius w/o upsampling. The Elgar upsampled to 24/192 is actually somewhat layed back compared to the Dodson. The dodson definitely sounds more Hifi which makes for a nice first impression but wears off after a few minutes of listening. Its funny: I saw your post about a week ago right as I began my comparison and thought: Hey theres someone else out there wondering pretty much the same as I. A couple of caveats: The differences may not be as great in different systems. My current system is fairly hi rez (as Albert P would say)I use the Soundlab U-1's and the Wavac HE-833 SET monos, Siversmith cables to and from the amps with Siltech cabling on the front end. I use the Forsell MkII transport. At first the Dodson sounded pretty thin and grainy out of the box. But as it warmed up it developed alot of body and smoothness to the sound. The Elgar always sounded smooth but was a little lifeless at first which went away as it warmed up. The final test came today when the Dodson had been burned in for 6days and the elgar (used) had warmed up for 3 days. The Elgar still won and just to be sure I asked my wife, who generally doesn't like high end audio, to do a blind comparison. She chose the Elgar/972 combo without flinching. Without the upsampling I would imagine I'd prefer the sound of the Dodson over the Elgar/Purcell. With it the dCS wins hands down. Its worth mentioning that the Doson upsamples to 24/192 then oversamples 4x up to 24/768. This ousnds impressive, but what nobody has seemed to point out (and I would like to hear if I'm correct here or not)the Elgar is a 64x oversampling DAC. So if its fed a 24/192 signal from the Purcell/972 and oversamples 64x that puts the frequency up around 5 million based on Dodson's calculations. If so thats more than the SACD format. Sorry for the long winded thread but I find this area of audio fascinating as well as sonically rewarding. As a last thought I will say that neither the Dodson or the dCS gaer have the totally luscious midrang that my former DAC; the Wadia 9 has. Combined with the Wavac's the Wadia 9 produced the most warm, spine tingling midrange I've ever heard. While the Dcs sounds closer to true real life, the Wadia 9 just left you feeling very warm and comfortable. Not as much resolution (but still plenty), just an incredible sense of rich glowing harmonics that made you forget about picking nits and relax. I sort of miss it.