I have the Doge 7 DAC and it’s quite good, to the point where I’m surprised it hasn’t garnered much of a following. I have it rolled with NOS tubes and it is very warm, liquid and images really well. I’m an analog guy so I go for DACs that reproduces the things I like about analog.
I can’t compare it to the others although I do have a little bit of GAS for those R2R DACs which supposedly are very analog-sounding.
If you go with the Doge the one tip I’ll give is that it sounds much better to upsample all PCM music to DSD - i suspect it’s because it has a CMOS chip that converts all incoming PCM signal to DSD since the ESS chipset is a delta-sigma DAC. Roon does this easily and it made a big improvement.
I can’t compare it to the others although I do have a little bit of GAS for those R2R DACs which supposedly are very analog-sounding.
If you go with the Doge the one tip I’ll give is that it sounds much better to upsample all PCM music to DSD - i suspect it’s because it has a CMOS chip that converts all incoming PCM signal to DSD since the ESS chipset is a delta-sigma DAC. Roon does this easily and it made a big improvement.