Soooo many choices.

I was able to have a nice extended listen with my wife (much better ears) a couple weekends ago and we listened to several DACS (peachtree iDac, rega dac, Ayre QB9, Mcintosh d100, and one ohter that escapes me) and what really surprised me was that with everything but the dac identical the dac to dac difference was plain as day. Other surprises were that with a "modest" system composed of a mac mini (ammara), rega brioR amp, some kind of speaker cables :) and peachtree D5 speakers we could easily tell differences in several different aspects of the music. Takeaway for me was that you owe it to yourself (I wont say you need to because you dont) to listen to as many as possible with music that is representative of yours (quality included). For me the enjoyment did not track with the cost as I had expected walking in. I dont really understand component karma but that system liked a couple of the units, treated one poorly, and made one almost difficult to listen to. all music was ripped lossless 16/44 while I was there with DBpoweramp.

loren personally I'd forget i heard anything about rates. if you digitize your plain old cd its 16/44. if you download some high definition stuff its mostly 24/96 with some 24/192. not sure any even is selling any 32 bit stuff, same with DSD. if you have 16/44 material and upsample (which puts bits in where there are none, using some algorithm, it will use up more storage space and may not sound much different. I have 2gb of music and none of it is beyond 16/44. im waiting for the wonder 64 bit system personally. that one will cook your breakfast in the morning as well.

I did what someone above suggested. my local dealer had my speakers (I was going to bring them anyway) and i had him put on his cheapest decent amp and let it fly. I had the ayre qb9 added to provide a "high end" dac for comparison. Not perfect bu you can drive yourself crazy. take your best shot, listen to what you can and dont sweat rates and dont look back.