Dac magic plus

@Dmgoodman - well, the Burson is an $800 stand-alone headphone amp, so I'm not really surprised. I got my Dacmagic Plus delivered yesterday. However, I'm still waiting for my Pangea USB cable and a replacement cable for my Sennheisers (my 7 year old somehow damaged the old one). In the meantime, I hooked it up briefly to with the cheapo USB cable that came with the DM+ into my Rotel amp. It sounded pretty good, but not that smooth. However, I'll reserve judgment until it's broken in and I'm using a proper cable.

Update - After a week with the DM+, I am sending it back today. I'm not even sure if I let it burn in long enough, but I just got the sense that I wasn't going to be 100% happy with it. I thought it was a bit bright at the top and I noticed too much sibilance (sp?) for my liking. Perhaps this would go away with further use, and perhaps it's my system, but I just ordered a Wadia 121, so we'll soon find out!

[By the way, it was hooked up in the following arrangement:
MacBook running Audirvana -> Pangea Pure Silver USB Cable -> Dacmagic+ -> Kimber Kable Hero XLR cables -> Rotel RB-991 power amp -> Hovland Ninelines speaker cables -> Meadowlark Kestrel Hotrods] Also tried it with my Sennheiser HD-600s plugged directly into the headphone jack.

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but I didn't think it sounded noticeably better than my tiny portable Dacport plugged into a preamp with a mini-RCA adapter.

Not surprized. Try the V-dac. More organic sound in my system.

Ssglx - I already ordered the Wadia 121.

FWIW, are you sure you want to eliminate the preamp? Below 80% of full volume, most digital volume controls will shed bits in order to attenuate the signal level, which might explain some of the problems you heard. I know nothing about Audirvana, so perhaps it deals with this issue, but otherwise, you should have at a least a passive, non-digital volume attenuator for volume control. Also, do you have any power-line filtering in use? Dirty a/c (like a/c polluted by computers on the same circuit) can contribute to some of the treble nastiness you described.