Couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. As I’m typing this, I’m listening to the Dave through a pair of Sennheiser 800S headphones to a marvelous DSD recording of chamber music (see below pic). Heard through my Lampi DAC on my Quad 2905 electrostatics with Audio Research Reference tube electronics, this recording is simply sublime, it is enthralling, it sounds magisterial with life sized images of Jon Manasse’s clarinet and Jon Nakamatsu’s piano. The recording goes from soft to loud really quickly, climaxes are thunderous. On the Dave/Sennheiser 800S, everything is miniaturized. The tone becomes significantly more brittle. Dynamics are compressed. It’s a pale shadow of the sound I hear on the Lampi DAC through my large 5” tall Quads. Some of this is because headphones intrinsically miniaturize the soundstage and compress dynamics, but not all of it. Essentially why people on this forum go to great lengths buying Sean Williams very expensive LPS for the Dave is precisely because the Dave on its own sounds quite wimpy. Someone previously said the power supply on the Dave is a $25 part, I’m not sure how accurate that is. But clearly Dave is built to a price point and parts quality has been economized, not least in the all important power supply. So, I agree, there’s a huge world out there beyond Dave, but only you can decide if it’s worth pursuing that. I’m keeping my Dave to serve as a quasi portable desktop DAC, where it fits the bill nicely. But in my high end system, it’s completely outclassed by other admittedly more expensive DACs.
