Yeah that's what I meant there. 

I get most of my music from Google Music All Access. 320kbps CBR is more than transparent enough for me.

If you look inside the nozzle you can actually see that this is indeed the case. It's filled with this foam stuff all the way. 

IMO there's no real point to a balanced setup unless you have really long cable lengths. 

General rule of thumb is minimum output impedance = (headphone impedance @ 1KHz)/8. SE846 is 9 ohm / 8 = 1.125 Ohm. The 5S is cutting it close.

I'd play pink noise but I heard that pink noise can make you crap your pants... is that true? 

You can also get a USB power splitter cable and an external USB (5V) battery. Works fine with the DF in my experience and you get (probably) cleaner power. 

I can't successfully ABX between LAME 44.1KHz MP3 @ 320kbps CBR and lossless with any of my equipment. And I don't envy the people who (claim?) they can.    I CAN successfully ABX a 128kbps MP3 and a 320kbps MP3, but even at this point have to try.    Resonessence Concero HD (or...

USB audio out on the DF still doesn't work where it should on all of my devices that support it (where it works fine with my Concero HD) even when externally powered with either a powered hub or a Y split cable, including my HTC One running 4.4  It simply has less compatibility with Android than...

I think there's better quality inline volume controls on the market than the Shure one. 

Not exclusively. According to Shure, it's supposed to be used as an analog volume control. Since the SE846 is so sensitive, you can't really listen to them at max volume on anything. But digital volume control on 16-bit decreases signal quality dramatically.    From the manual:   The...

Anyone know if the Concero HD (not HP) and Concero use the 32-bit volume control feature of the Sabre DAC, or does it relegate volume control processing to the source computer?   EDIT: Concero HD DOES as of 2.5 but not earlier, according to the changelog on the website and the Twitter. Not...

I haven't been able to get the DF to run with any of my Android devices (versus my other DACs) which is one reason I'm currently ebaying it. Glad to hear it works with the Note 3 though. 

No. You can unplug it at anytime.