Thanks for the review Gunner, excellent read. Short and concise. Question - Is there a reason you used the USB from the Schiit and the Coax from Emo? I'm considering the Emo for my gaming/media setup. I don't need something super expensive, but one thing I do need is at least a decent USB.

Thanks Greed! The USB is generally agreed to be the best input for the gungnir around here. The reason I used coax on the Emo was because both dacs use the same drivers and USB receiver chips. I didn't want them to interfere with each other when I was doing the comparisons using ASIO4ALL. I did not notice any difference between the USB and Coax on the Emo (Async is applied to all inputs on the Emo). However, if you use CIEMs, you may notice some noise when using the USB input. Otherwise, the USB works great.

Real shame that the headphone amp section isn't worth much.  Emotiva is a TN company, and I've always wanted to try their stuff.

Why not worth much? Because of the bass boost? This shouldn't be a problem if it can be turned off with a jumper. Measurements look good.

I ended up buying a DC-1 last week thanks to this review, but also because I'm partial to AD1955 based DACs. Don't really have much to say at the moment except that it sounds great. I've compared it with my Cambridge 840C which also has dual AD1955 but upsamples everything to 24/384, and surprisingly it wasn't hard to tell the differences even though I expected the two units to sound similar at first. The 840C has more high end sparkly treble going on bordering on digititus, while the DC-1 is more neutral but more closed in. I'll try to compare it to a Gungnir when I can. Thanks for the review.