Gentlemen, jitter has been the #1 design consideration in audio for long. Audio manufacturers like Meridian engineered buffered systems with accurate clocks and charged a premium for their products. Only that, now all this circuitry has been miniaturized and available in a single chip. To be fair to the reasonable of the audio reviewer lot, some do mention that DACs in the $1K range are now offering performance that had cost 10 times a few years ago. One of the main aspects of the DAC design is to receive data but reject the jitter in it. The CS8416 receiver used in the Headroom DAC is not bad, but apparently the diy audiophile community seems to favor the WM8805 chip because of a buffered logic. (These chips may have only a few micro sec buffer, but something like the TotalDAC is engineered with 0.1 sec buffer) . Please note, the quality of the power supply will greatly influence jitter. So, if you take the Aune X1 (for example) and modded the dc regulators to ensure a clean power supply (costing less than a few dollars) it might rival the performance of $1K dacs. BTW, I am also upset about the Squeezebox getting 'damned with faint praise' but I do see quite a few audio reviewers are using it as a transport with very good DACs.
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