In case anyone is interested, I received my Emotiva XDA-1 DAC and it works beautifully. I am using it in my second system which consists of a vintage Carver C-1 stereo preamp, a Carver AV-505 amplifier, and a pair of vintage Polk Audio RTA-12c speakers. I probably could have set the system up using the XDA-1 exclusively without the Carver preamp but the whole point was to make my vintage gear shine (I am the original owner of all this sh..stuff).

The source is probably overkill. I am using a Sun Ultra 27 workstation running 64-bit Ubuntu Linux - my second system is in my office/lab.

If Outlaw audio would have provided a similar piece of equipment, and as close as I came to buying a B-stock 990 processor to fit this function, I definitely would have bought an Outlaw product. So perhaps this is not a bad future product to consider.

Last month I attended the Capital Audiofest and there were two clear trends. It seems that every system had tube amplifiers, to the point that it became cliche. The second trend was that the vast majority of the sources were either vinyl or "file-based" digital music, split about 50-50. Vinyl is obviously a vintage/historical product. Therefore, the future (in my opinion) is in anything related to digital music management systems. A Qsonix Q205 music management system at around $8K is more expensive than my entire system (which includes an "overkill" $6K server), and provides me with arguably the same [audio] capability. Outlaw audio could come in, like they did with the amplifier and processor market, and become a game-changer in this field.