Ouch ! You can get a bit perfect DAC for around $395 ....only audiophile Dacs cost $12k ;-)
I know. But I try to do my 'audiophile' stuff in the right places
And that starts at the DAC as you can't do better than 'bit perfect' from the source. Which is why some of these 'unapproved' JRiver plug ins are a waste of money, mentioning no names. Then speakers. Amplifiers (I use Naim) don't matter too much as any half-decent amp will distort much less than the DAC or speakers (the speakers distort most of all). After 35 years in the computer industry I know how computers work, unlike so many 'experts' I see on one particular forum. If they knew how they worked too we would not see all this nonsense about trigger reference level voltage, leading edge slope, linear power supplies, and stuff. Maybe jitter and clocking is nonsense too. A decent DAC can deal with all that, most of which does not occur anyway. The 'experts' all seem to forget that the 0 or the 1 is detected in the middle of the pulse, both vertically and horizontally, so such things don't matter at all. Such people are not 'experts' in any way. For example 'leading edge slope' doesn't happen on USB as many of the pulses don't have leading edges anyway due to the NRZI coding USB uses. You don't need a fancy high priced source.
The one thing I won't buy is a DAC that needs the +5 volts from the source for its USB connection. That can inject noise straight into the DAC. Not even my earlier $300 Cambridge Audo Dacmagic needed that but amazingly some of the expensive ones still do. But my dCS doesn't.
So JRiver's simple box would do me fine
. JRiver Media Centre is as good as any other software player, maybe better than most, and hopefully this little box will be the same.