Here's the thread I posted on the other Forum about this topic:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24670

Of course these folks may be biased towards the Squeezebox, but they're also very smart technically.

Suffice it to say so far that you can do very, very good with a good DAC. Whether it's the equivalent of a $10k CD player can be debated, but even there the differences must be extremely subtle.