I'm kinda interested in more hard sonic info. Been thinking about a Squeezebox; my wife is waaayyyy into the idea of transferring our CDs to files as a space saver, but she also knows it would take an extraordinary amount of effort and some heavy storage capacity to actually accomplish that goal. Of course, I'm quite happy with the DACs in our Marantz carousel. I actually own two of them; got the second one dirt-cheap when the first was being serviced last year after an accident in our apartment (long story that has absolutely nothing to do with the Marantz's quality). Really like carousels, but for obvious reasons they're becoming dinosaurs.

The route I took was to keep my 970 (which I am very happy with) and address it's two-channel shortcomings by purchasing an audiophile-type outboard DAC. The net result cost-wise is the same as the difference between the 970 and 990 ($300). The DAC I'm using (Musiland MD10) uses Cirrus's Flagship CS4398 D/A Chip. It also allows you to select bit-depth on the fly (16, 20 and 24 bit). It's new, so I'm still evaluating it, but so far, I have been very happy with my purchase. I'm not sure how the 990's Analog Device AD1852 stacks up against the Cirrus, but I would venture to say it is no slouch.

Regarding tru blu's comment about storage capacity, with FLAC, you get compression that reduces the WAV file to 1/8th its original size, so you can fit a lot of songs per gig' of storage space. That said, it is time consuming ripping your CD collection.

Anybody know what kind of DAC was used on Oppo 981?

As I understand it, the Mediatek chip that serves as video DAC in the 981HD (used just for the composite and s-video outputs in this case) is also the audio processor and DAC. I've got some pictures under the hood in my 981HD review .

When I use the analogue/bypass route on my 970 I have it hooked up to my Denon 2910 universal player. I really like it for vocals because it sounds more natural with the voices coming smack dab from the center of the sound stage......noticeably more so than the 970's stereo mode.