Not even remotely ready to buy so I'll hold off.

What part of 'Inherently, in typical USB implementations' was unclear?  You think a galvanically isolated/asynchronous or Offramp solution is typical?  Hell, XMOS isn't even typical.  The world of USB is largely comprised of crap solutions, not USB solutions that cost as much as a car or require meticulous hardware or software settings.

I thought the comment would be be pretty obvious that most people take a normal USB port on a normal computer and connect a normal cable to a normal device and think 'voila' done.  That is a 'typical USB implementation'. 

I'll put it this way.  95% of USB implementations are worse than a decent CD transport feeding coax to the same DAC.  It's typical belief that bits are bits and one digital connection is just as good as another.  I've come to appreciate via experience Jason Stoddard's comment when he was starting about why he didn't offer USB on their products, because USB is crap.  At least at the price point they operate at.  They succumbed to the market pressure and offered USB and are now doing it well.  Nobody is going to buy a $1400 OR5 for a Bifrost or Gungnir or most anything else out there even below $2K.  At certain price points, people expect cheap stuff to be a digitally perfect plug and play affair because that's what we've all been promised and force fed.

Wow, one of the best descriptions of USB use & it's implementations for Audio that I've read. This almost sounds like something Steve Nuggent might have said or is saying .

I'm not really that impressed w/ what anyone has said regardless of what their technical background is unless  I come across some shred of commonality of their findings that I may have found echoes my reaction to this shared experience . When you begin to notice that you can relate to several unrelated reactions to various other things over a span of time, you at least have some basis to decide whether you care to pay attention to what they are saying. (I don't know , this only seems to be reverse logic to me ; Could just be you have the same exact delusional flaw, but they say "misery loves company" so I just go w/ it ). If you can "humanize" the result of the physics that occurred it becomes "literate" to me.

Steve N. has had a habit of doing that for me for a few years now. I decided to give his Synchro Mesh Reclocker a try , not because I did'nt think my digital source was doing a poor job (& sorry I really have no interest in talking about my sources for now), but because I was intrigued to see if it could "pick up the game" of what I'd been using. It made a good showing of itself. It is staying.

Empirical Audio is one of the "Good Guys" 

This seems to be more about the quality of the power than the chip implementation.  Like, I got a Stello U3 (Xmos) and noticed marginal improvements over whatever crap was in my old W4S (using an M51 now) and then I added the Aqvox USB power supply to that a few weeks later and noticed substantially better improvements. 

Basically: U3 w/power supply >>> U3 > crap USB

This thing probably crushes my setup, though.

This seems to be more about the quality of the power than the chip implementation.  Like, I got a Stello U3 (Xmos) and noticed marginal improvements over whatever crap was in my old W4S (using an M51 now) and then I added the Aqvox USB power supply to that a few weeks later and noticed substantially better improvements. 

Basically: U3 w/power supply >>> U3 > crap USB

This thing probably crushes my setup, though.

That's definitely a big part of it, but far from all of it. As far as I know the input board in the W4S DAC2 is the same Hiface OEM that the OR and Overdrive, but obviously the result is very different. Drawing power from the USB line is very convenient which is why a lot of converters and DACs use it, but it's horribly noisy, and it makes isolation very difficult. Bus powered USB converters can use pulse transformers on their outputs to deal with it somewhat, but if you have a USB DAC with a bus powered implementation that goes straight to internal I2S, you're pretty much screwed. All of that DC noise and ground noise gets dumped straight into the DAC.

The OR uses no bus power. Everything comes from an external 12V wall-wart, which you can always replace with a LPS or battery if you want to go nuts with it. You're likely to get more benefit from upgrading your computer's power supply to linear or battery though rather than the OR.

I have been planning on giving the Overdrive SE a try for a few weeks connected to a Mac Mini possibly this June/July if everything works out. 

Since the DAC has a great preamp built-in and the equiv of an Off-Ramp USB input as well, it doesn't seem like a bad deal.

BTW, hope it's okay Marv I stole your pic for my new avatar...

The competition in that class are the Berkeley Alpha combo, the Bricasti, Meitner, Playback MPD-3, and MSB Analog. I'm sure there are others but those are the big ones at $6-8K, leaving out the Calyx Femto which seems like a hyper-priced, glorified standard Calyx DAC without much to back it up.

The USB input on the Overdrive should at the very least match if not beat any of them. As for the rest of it, I don't know. Steve is very proud of his "hybrid" volume control, but I haven't seen it directly compared to a top shelf passive or active line stage. The only thing I know about the actual chips he uses is that they aren't R2R, otherwise he wont say.