CybDev, any chance to compare the Hilo to the Benchmark DAC2 and the Mytek yet? These are basically the three I'm tossing up between at the moment and I'd love to read a comparison (even if only brief).
Yeah I spent about 3 days comparing them with SE-535(IEM) HD800(dyn) and SRM-323/SR-009.
The MyTek and Hilo both are not ideal for high sensitivity IEM's, there is quite a lot of hissing, and in a quiet room I was also able to hear that on the HD800...
The DAC2 is dead silent.
I liked a lot of the Hilo features, however, the USB support is somewhat dodgy, and it does not work at all on linux, some times it would completely fail to get a lock and playback would become almost pure noise/wrong speed etc, especially when switching from 16/44.1 to 24/96 or similar using foobar2k wasapi on win7.
Quite frankly I did not like the mytek, I found both the hilo and dac2 to be more revealing, and have less issues.
In the end I chose the DAC2 since I don't need the ADC part from Hilo(the mytek was the preamp version), and the DAC2 had no issues what so ever with drivers on win7/mountain lion/ubuntu precise, or switching wordlength/samplerate between tracks, and was dead silent even on the sensitive SE-535.
Hope that helps, and I'll see if I can find the notes I took while I was doing the comparing when I get home.
