The Maverick Tube Magic DAC/Pre arrived here from China, 1 week after I placed the order. It came well packaged and came with the tube upgrade.

It feels solid and well made except for the volume knob which seems a little cheap, but for $199 I was not expecting much. The unit has good weight to it. It has multiple inputs- optical, digital coax, usb and analog. It has tube analog out and solid state out's along with a headphone out. It also has a direct button for bypassing the volume control for when you are using it as a DAC only.

I hooked it up to a Sony DVD/SACD multi disk player and a Technic's SU-7600 integrated amp that I bought in 1976. The speakers used where Monitor Audio S1's and B&W 602's. I was pleasantly surprised when I finally got to hear it. It had good bass and depth to the music. There was some air and transparency. The high end could have used a little better detail. Mid range could have been a little smoother on vocals though. After a few hours of play time I upgraded the opamps as per recommendations from other owners. It cost me $10 for the opamps from Digikey. The upgrade really improved the sound. Bass was tightend up and had more punch, treble had more resolution but was slightly pushed back and the midrange smoothed out. There was also a bit more air.

I tried all the inputs and they work as advertised. The one minor down side is that the solid state analog out is not very good. It's harsh sounding, although I did not try it with the opamp upgrade. I don't ever plan on using the SS out. I will be hooking it up to my reference system later today and will give an update on the sound.

Over all it was well worth the money for a cheap system upgrade or if you need a usb DAC.