I got an email back from Ryan, who is the owner?/operator? of Maverick audio about the components. He sent a picture of the insides (that tube looks cool
), but said he would prefer not to disclose the D/A chip to protect his design from cloning. Pretty understandable considering how crowded the value market is getting. Doesn't help us estimate the sound quality, but it is a start. I have also encouraged him to join our forum here to get to know us, what we are looking for, and to allow us to get to know him. Here is the email and the pic he sent me. Hopefully someone with knowledge of the interiors of these things can take a peek and make some educated guesses for newbies like me.
"We only use audio grade components in our DAC. For examples, R-core transformer, metal film resistors, ceramic capacitors and Japanese audio grade Rubycon capacitors, high quality cable with silver shield are used in the DAC.
Attached is an internal picture of our DAC. Please note it is all made by hand, it doesn't look as good as those PCB boards made by SMT machine, but you can not make an audio grade product by using "SMT friendly" components.
I will not be able to disclose the DAC chip model used in our DAC (to avoid other vendor to copy our design). We believe the analog output stage is as important as DAC chip. Ultimately, the digital sound will go through the analog output stage, same chip might sound completely different go through different analog output stage. We have spent a great deal of effort to design the analog output stage and we are very confident that our DAC sounds at least as good as some much expensive models."
PS. If anyone could use a higher resolution image and not the resized one, let me know and I can email it to you.