Well, I had given the Jot+DAC more than the benefit of the doubt. I really wanted to like it, but tonight, I give into what my ears have been telling me since the beginning.
This is what I have learned from the Jot+DAC. The DAC is terrible! The amp is very nice. I knew this less than 30 minutes in to listening to it, but I really wanted to like Schiit. I had started the return process with Schiit, but at the last minute, I chose to keep it so now I'm really beyond the return window. But, I can lie to my ears only for so long. I'm supposed to enjoy the music, not keep justifying the Jot+DAC is just as good.
I tried burning it in. The sound did get better. I think my headphones benefited from the exercise too. But the DAC sound just would not open up. It continued to feel closed in like the sound is a ball of noise in the middle. So much detail was getting muffled. On every listening session, when I felt like doing an AB test with the Element, the difference is so apparent. The DAC makes listening to the Jot like I'm inside a shoebox. The Element is like listening to an appropriately sized listening room and the details, that the Jot does not hide so much as it gets lost in the ball of sound, are so beautifully apparent with perfect separation.
I listened briefly to the Jot bypassing the DAC by using the Element through the RCA inputs. The amp sounded great. I visited Schiitr last weekend too. I listened to a Jot+DAC, but I connected a Bifrost Multibit to it instead. It sounded great. It is clearly the onboard DAC that sounds like a pile of schiit.
Tonight, I finally removed the Jot+DAC from my desk and replaced it with the Element as my primary listening amp. I'm saddened and disappointed by this very expensive mistake.
The headphones I used were:
Sony MDR-7506
Audio-Technica ath-m50x
Shure SRH-840
AKG K7xx
Sennheiser HD650
The only headphone that sounded good with the Jot+DAC was the AKG K7xx because the soundstage of the headphones were so unbelievably wide it countered the closed-in-ness of the Jot+DAC.
In conclusion, I would recommend the Jot only w/o the DAC, but I would highly recommend the JDS Labs Element. Now, I need to figure out whether to sell the Jot+DAC or just use it in a secondary listening station.