Soooo many choices.

I have no idea what lots of the acronyms these days mean.

Doggitter - the best advice I can give you is to...
- first list your requirements in detail, then
- compare the specs of the dacs you are considering
- try to audition them - at home if possible
- then make the decision.

Schiit has a 15 day return policy and charges 5% restock fee and you have to pay the retun post - so you can audition in house, but there is cost associated to that.

Both Bifrost and Gungnir are no frills DACs i.e.
- they have no remote to change inputs
- the do not display sample rate currently playing
- they have no volume control
- they have no filters (like the Cambridge Audio DACs)

If you require any of those features, then they are not for you.

Wadia, Mytek and Chord have great DACs in your price range and all sound very good and some has those features.

Of those three I thought Mytek was probably the most dynamic and was priced around $1500 here in Canada

There are many more out there also, so take your time in selecting.

At least you have narrowed your search to a Streaming device and a DAC - this will probably give the the most flexibility for future upgrades

Just make sure the streaming device is able to send the raw files and does not "upsample" in some manner.

I know nothing of the Dragonfly so I am unable to comment.

Regards...

One last point to consider - on some dacs not all inputs have the same Max sample rate. Very often one input will process a lower rate.

What is dsd?

The problem with listing what I want is that I don't really know what I want, other than a simple, no frills unit that sounds fantastic, has a usb and a digital input for the cdp. Flashy and busy won't cut it.

I'm guessing by your post upsampling is bad? Seems lots of text I've read about it before led me to believe it's desirable.

The buttons on the cdp remote is all(and more than) I really care to have a remote for. Not really into bells and whistles.

For that price you can get a used Eastern Electric Dac+ with the discrete op-amps. Mine made great music for a long time before I bought an AMR 77. And the EE Dac+ was very close to the overall performance of the much more expensive AMR.