Solid state DAC under 12K retail preferably with ethernet

Perhaps I shouldn't care about ethernet for now, since most DACs don't have it yet and I can pick up a network player for 2K.

You should care.  Jitter is the #1 issue with digital playback and Ethernet enables the lowest jitter I have experienced in 15 years of doing this.  This is why I abandoned my XMOS USB interface in favor of Ethernet.  It will not matter how good your DAC is if the streaming interface produces too much jitter to achieve pinpoint imaging.

As with USB, the design and implementation of the Ethernet interface also matters.  They are not all the same.  In the best case, it can produce very low jitter.  In the worst case, it could be worse than XMOS USB.  And a Network player will not solve that for you unless it has a really good clock and interface design/implementation.  Most of them have proven to have sub-par jitter performance using their S/PDIF outputs. They are better using an external USB interface.  If that's any indication, you will NOT be better off with a network player.  It's that last Ethernet interface before the D/A that uses the master clock that matters.

This is the whole advantage of Ethernet.  You don't need to buy any fancy server or a computer with LPS powering it etc...  Any computer on the network will do.

Steve N.

Empirical Audio