DAC upgrade

You might consider a Bricasti M 1 Series II. It offers an excellent balance of musicality w/ dynamics & detail. Like all Bricasti, their build quality is top notch made in MA & they machine just about every part in house, wind their own transformers & have their in house designed PCB’s made directly next door at a specialty shop. Their gear is known for great reliability & upgradability. I’m very pleased with mine.

I second the prior posting. I have a Bricasti Designs’ M21 DAC and have found its performance to be exquisite.

@wjcasey3rd 

A dedicated room for all that awesome gear and speakers !!

The new room is currently being built (old garage getting converted to livable space). Putting some treatments in the walls (decoupling the drywall from the framing) and working with GIK to add in treatment around the room. It’s still in progress. 

You should definitely read Premium Home Theater by Earl Geddes for a good education on optimizing room design for audio.  It’s very informative and easy to understand and goes through things like resilient channels, Sheetrock type/thickness, etc. — things everyone should know before building a dedicated room (chapters 5 and 6 in particular).

http://www.gedlee.com/Books/HomeTheater.aspx

I had the Chord Dave with Luxman power/pre and Magico speakers.  The detail was excellent but I wanted a more natural, musical sound.  I tried a few others like T+A, MSB discrete-and then took a leap of faith and jumped into the Playback Designs MPD-8. For my taste - this DAC is really, really good.  It's much more natural-more analog sounding - with plenty of detail.  

I then A/B'd the Playback DAC with Luxman Pre, vs going directly from DAC  to Luxman amp. Well, the DAC directly to amp sounds better-very noticeable better.