Indeed!  These ultra-high priced items are usually about buying bragging rights.  But are there even enough audiophiles around any longer to brag to about your new $150,000 amplifier or $250,000 turntable (and who won't think that you're insane)?  It's a very exclusive club.     Those...

  Oh, I'm not worried.  It'll get here when it gets here.  And better Fedex than UPS!

  I ordered about 7 hours after it went live on the 23rd.  Looks like I have quite a wait ahead...

The U-Turn will be the better turntable as long as you don't need the LP120's 78-rpm support or reverse play features.  And with the LP120 the audio always passes through the sub-par built-in phono stage, even if you switch it "off" (but you can find several Youtube guides showing how to rip it...

Check the Samsung manual first to verify whether it'll send Dolby Digital/AC-3 from the digital output, or whether it'll send PCM stereo (or allow you to pick which you want).  If the former than the Fiio D3 will not work.

I believe you're off by a factor of 10X here. Most USB 2.0 controllers are capable of sustaining 30MB/sec (240Mbit/sec). This is half of the theoretical peak USB 2.0 bandwidth of 480Mbit/sec.

The standards for S/PDIF were set long before the existence of FLAC or of > 2 channel uncompressed PCM. Thus it cannot transport newer formats -- FLAC, DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, etc -- nor can it transport uncompressed PCM with more than 2 channels. It just wasn't designed for it. If you want to...