Sabaj A20d 2022 Version ES9038PRO Hi-Res Balanced Audio DAC XLR to 4.0 Vrms Headphone Amplifier XMOS XU216 Support LDAC apt-x HD DSD512 MQA USB/Optical/Coaxial/Bluetooth

One of the review below nailed it - I’ve heard things on tracks that I’ve been listening to for over 20 years that I haven’t heard before with this DAC/amp. It has a user friendly UI and it’s way to set up. So far it’s locked on to a signal from both optical from a cd player and usb from a MacBook Pro very well.It has a nice feature where you can set the DPLL to lower jitter manually. A lower setting is better and to me, improves SQ.Imaging is precise and everything sounds very natural to me. There’s quite a bit of punch and impact to the sound through headphones. It manages to extract detail without being bright. It just brings out clarity and textures in the music and handles complex passages very, very well.

Having worked in the hifi industry I can tell you this dac outperforms those costing thousands more, literally. I heard music in tracks that I know that I have never heard before, I had this paired with a Quad 909 power amp and wharfedale 510.2 speakers. What I liked about this compared to the Sabaj D5 is the screen, the information is larger and readable from seating position. I also liked that it locked onto the streamer and put it into fixed output mode. In addition, unlike the topping offerings it locks onto optical inputs easily, for example when playing audio from tv. In terms of sound quality and overall performance it’s absolutely incredible value for money.