I didn't mean to imply that I expect anywhere near the performance of my home setup in the KSE1500. I would be happy with a reasonable compromise, one that was truly portable [not a 3-box stack]. But from reading the reviews so far, it appears that Shure put most of their investment in the electrostatic iems and amp, and the DAC was the weak link in the system. This is a pretty universal opinion from those that have heard the setup. I guess I will need to hear it for myself before laying out $3K.
After owning the kse1500 for a month now, I really do believe both DAC and especially the Amp are whats restricting the kse1500 from its true potential. I have been running it with the Hugo and while the sound stage is wider and very micro detailed, the kse1500 Amp is not optimal to process all of the output signal from the Hugo.