Certainly, your point is well taken. I can't speak for others with their 950s. If you review the board for previous posts by those people, I think the picture that emerges is that the 950 is probably borderline in it's noise performance. Personally, I think they just tried to cut it too close, possibly with basic design, or possibly with using a lower spec'd grade of IC than will be in the higher priced spin-offs of this unit from Atlantic Technology and others. For all I know, they could be using a VLSIC that combines basically all the functions of the 950 on a single chip, or chipset. Then the blame would be with the supplier of the ICs (Cirrus Logic I believe).