Thanks for warm welcome Feanor.

I was just happy that I quickly found a sound component combination that I am very happy to listen to and engages me with my music. I was surprised at the difference in tonal quality of my sound system by making a few simple component substitutions. OK, not that simple if I had to replace the SMSL DAC with the original 2010 version. The OPA627 might offer some further improvements but probably a bit too pricey for my budget. As to why you would want to connect a high frequency "switching" mode power supply to a low noise digital-analog amplifier (the DAC), I would probably think that a linear PSU has intuitively less additional noise that can find its way onto the analog outputs. Maybe the school of thought that a SMPS is better with cheaper DAC's is that the additional switching noise generated in effect competes with the digital noise produced by the DAC itself to mask the amplitude of certain dominant noise frequencies. I really don't know either :-). Suffice it to say, the early adopters who bought the first version of the SD-1955 were the lucky ones who bought a really nice sweet sounding, well-designed piece of audio kit. As for the second version SD-1955+ and probably its latest incarnation, the "Sanskrit", the performance has already been compromised for commercial reasons in my opinion. I hope other people like me get lucky on eBay.

roclite