Hi Pfgray, This is my first post so hope that I can be of some help. Having heard them all I would strongly recommend the M1 DAC-A. It will happily take up to 24/96 on the USB and 192 on the Coaxial and Toslink inputs. Secondly I would be more inclined for PC audio to run with USB as optical/toslink will offer alot more jitter than the ASync USB connection.

In regards to playback I would advise not using iTunes for playback, instead try foobar2k and download the wasapi.dll plugin for it. This will bypass the windows 7 output selector so you won't have to keep going to the windows settings select what type of file you are playing. With the M1 DAC it upsamples EVERYTHING to 24/192 and will auto recognise all the samples rates it is fed be it over USB, Coaxial or Optical. If you NEED 24/192 and not many people do then you can buy the V-Link 192 at a later date to pass 24/192 files into the M1 DAC however many will probably state that 24/192 is noisier than 24/96, something I have experienced and heard with the Colorfly C4 when changing the upsampling rates.

High definition downloads are currently few and far between, HD-Tracks in the US probably offers at the moment the greatest selection, but don't expect new releases to come out in High Definition just yet.

Regards

Phil wrote:

Hi Pfgray, This is my first post so hope that I can be of some help. Having heard them all I would strongly recommend the M1 DAC-A. It will happily take up to 24/96 on the USB and 192 on the Coaxial and Toslink inputs. Secondly I would be more inclined for PC audio to run with USB as optical/toslink will offer alot more jitter than the ASync USB connection.

Could you please provide proof of the second part of this statement, i.e. that ASync USB has lower jitter than optical/toslink before this nonsense just becomes yet another audiophile myth.

Phil wrote:

In regards to playback I would advise not using iTunes for playback, instead try foobar2k and download the wasapi.dll plugin for it. This will bypass the windows 7 output selector so you won't have to keep going to the windows settings select what type of file you are playing. With the M1 DAC it upsamples EVERYTHING to 24/192 and will auto recognise all the samples rates it is fed be it over USB, Coaxial or Optical. If you NEED 24/192 and not many people do then you can buy the V-Link 192 at a later date to pass 24/192 files into the M1 DAC however many will probably state that 24/192 is noisier than 24/96, something I have experienced and heard with the Colorfly C4 when changing the upsampling rates.

Good call since iTunes is one of the worst music library management and playback programs currently available.

Phil wrote:

High definition downloads are currently few and far between, HD-Tracks in the US probably offers at the moment the greatest selection, but don't expect new releases to come out in High Definition just yet.

Regards

Beware of HDTracks! Many of their "high definition" offerings are either upsampled redbook recordings or have heavy dynamic range compression or both! Personally I'm not giving HDTracks another penny of my money until they clean up their act.