Yes, everyone who has said that the specs on paper for the DACs is only part of the picture is correct. You can take a very expensive DAC with great specs and stick it in a poor PCB layout, in a system with noisy power supplies, and stick low quality components in the output filtering and end up with something that, as a system, has terrible measured performance and sounds awful. Circuit topology and board layout and type (i.e. 2 vs 4 layer) play a big part in the finished product.

My feeling is that Eastech (who does Outlaw's engineering, I believe) seems to design to reasonably good standards. I poked and peeked into the various 950's that I had early on in the process when it was introduced and thought they did a reasonable job. It was not over-designed as many boutique pieces are (which is sometimes cool, but not always necessary for performance).