When you come to think about it, all delta sigma DAC chips do on-the-fly resampling, although we don't see it, as the upsampling/oversampling filters are implemented internally on the chip. A DSD DAC equipped with DSD256 input like the AK4490EQ basically gives you the choice to use external...

  Baldr, you've almost convinced me to get it.    But anyway, thanks for chiming in. I guess it was too good to be true, a USB DAC with DSD256 AKM chip in the $150-200 region. 

   I think it would have to be done professionally by Schiit in their lab. 

  Yes, precisely.

  I know that Jason is a believer in native PCM, and although personally I'm not as optimistic about the future of native PCM as he is, I don't knock Schiit's idea to make a native PCM DAC. If you can find any albums recorded with native PCM ADCs and want to hear them natively, go for it (if...

  Yes, that's just my suggestion, and hope    As for the cost of developing such dac, it couldn't be much higher because it would basically boil down to replacing the older AKM chip with the newer AK4490EQ that goes up to 11.298MHz DSD.

  That can't be true because Asahi Kasei has just announced a new DSD256 ADC scheduled for February 2015, new Merging A/D 11.2Mhz converters are increasingly popular among labels, and even Mytek plans to release new DSD256 ADC soon. What these developments suggest to me is that the number of...

  Don't think that people would be less likely to buy a higher spec DSD DAC that can actually play all DSD files (64/128/256) and is priced at the same affordable level. That wouldn't be rational.   I just want Schiit to make a cheap DAC that can play DSD up to 11.298MHz so that I can play...

  I would NOT buy the Loki so the Loki doesn't demonstrate much, as far as I'm concerned. If anything, the Loki demonstrated that if you release a DSD-only DAC and limit it to DSD64 only, it's kinda deal breaker. 

  I would buy it in a heartbeat, because the value for the money this product would offer would be too good to pass up. 

  The color options are of no importance to me, as long as the Loki mkII has replaced the old AKM dac chip with the newer AK4490EQ which supports DSD256, and Schiit's own HQ low-pass filter. The modifications shouldn't cost that much, and that's why I think this Schiit would be hard to beat in...

  I only wanted to express my hope that Schiit won't abandon the affordable audio market, by limiting their offering to + $2000 components from now on. A $149 DSD256 Loki mkII would offer great value for money, as far as the affordable audio components go. I doubt that anyone could top that...

  The number of DSD128 and DSD256 releases appears to be growing, but I'm planning to upsample all my redbook CDs to DSD256 as well so the Loki mkII could play those too, and what's important without the brickwall filtering. For $149 (or close to it) this kind of solution looks like an absolute...

That's not surprising, I don't have any interest in the DSD64-limited Loki either. If Schiit enables dsd256 on the mkII version, and again, keeps the affordable price tag (or the price remains near the original level), they have my ear, and money.    Let the well-heeled audiophiles have their...

I hope that with the release of the expensive Ygdrasil, Schiit won't forget about the affordable audio market. I'll be waiting for the Loki mkII with DSD256 for $149. That seems like a really good deal, and should sound great too. 

  I have a question regarding the AMR DAC, if you don't mind.    Do you know if AMR has enabled native DSD on the DP-777 SE's WM8741 chip ? I've checked its data sheet, and it talks about native support for single-rate-DSD. I was also wondering whether something more could be squeezed out of...

  I'd prefer if they provided a fix (or at least a workaround of some sorts) to the buggy DoP protocol as well as ensured compatibility with Mac ASIO DSD mode that is currently available on Decibel and HQPlayer, as I would much rather bypass Core Audio altogether.

  Then GradoSound's gripe about having to install a driver is a non-issue. I doubt that iFi ever received a trouble ticket from anyone just because they didn't like the idea of installing a driver for their iFi/AMR DAC, and they surely received plenty with the DoP thing.

  And how does the situation look like with Windows? Do iFi's ASIO drivers work with other DACs?

  Unfortunately, they failed at it and the DoP issue is still there in September 2014.   In the meantime, Decibel -- and two months after Decibel, another developer Signalyst/HQPlayer -- enabled Mac ASIO Native mode on their apps.

  http://www.exasound.com/Blog/tabid/74/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/155/Decibel-13--The-First-Audiophile-Player-with-Mac-OS-X-ASIO-Support.aspx

  No (they neither confirmed nor denied it), but you keep making it sound like the solution to the problem doesn't exist, when it actually does exist, it only has to be implemented by more companies, including iFi.

  Using ASIO Native, instead of DoP (the culprit of pops), is a no-brainer when you're on a Windows system.    Fortunately, ASIO support is now being brought to Mac OSX as well, and that should solve the 'pop' issue once and for all.

If you say so...   Btw, is 2L still the only label in the entire world that releases DXD stuff?   Personally, I couldn't care less about DXD, the files are huge, and not even PCM, when you consider the fact they are all recorded with Delta Sigma converters.

Well, the pops won't go away without more software work anyway. It's only a matter of whether iFi chooses to work on a workaround (that removes the pops) to a workaround (DoP) that is running on the inferior Core Audio architecture, or to develop a new ASIO driver that can work with the Mac...