S.M.S.L M500 MQA DAC DSD512 24Bit/768Khz Stereo Headphone Amplifier USB/OPT/COAX Input (Silver)

I suspect it may be luck of the draw with this one as you may get one that works perfectly. Mine sounded great for an hour, recognising MQA from Tidal. The remote didn't work but I was going to just get that replaced. I then discovered that the dac, despite the blurb does not support DSD! To cap it off (after hour one) the sound became distorted and unlistenable. Amazon's return policy has made sending it back very easy but I would suggest looking elsewhere.

A great quality unit for the price. My son uses with Genelec speakers / Beyer headphones. Every detail is well presented and a great stereo image. Well built. In future he will add a sub bass unit knowing the dac will deliver.

Really pleased with the M500 , I replaced a rip with audiophonics Dac board on and even though they both had the same ES9038 chip in the smsl was better in every way!

Can't be beat at the price. It is an excellent preamp and headphone amp. The MQA is a bonus.

I love the sound of the full MQA unfolding.

I bought this DAC to replace a very good DAC, an Audiolab M-DAC which costs £600 and won many What HiFi awards.I thought the Audiolab sounded good but I had lots of problems when trying to connect to it using USB, on 3 different computers I would get a popping noise during playback and eventually had to use optical instead of USB.I'd heard about the SMSL and the specs showed it uses the ES9038PRO which is the latest digital to analogue chip from ESS, it also has the XMOS XU-216 USB chip which is the latest chip for USB DACs and enables MQA.I received the DAC last Friday and I've spent my 1st weekend rediscovering my music collection. The sound from this little device is absolutely stunning. I've got it connected via balanced XLR cables to a pair of Elac F-51 active speakers which cost £3600 and it's really making them sing.The M500 has a built in digital volume control so it's like having a built in pre amp. The fact the volume is handled on the digital side means the left/right balance is perfect. This can be heard when listening to music or watching movies, the sound stage from the M500 is better than anything I've heard before.Over my Audiolab DAC it's fixed an issue I was having with the bass from my speakers booming and having no bass definition. Kick drums on songs now have real bite and music from Simple Minds which felt a bit flat before now grabs hold of you and gives you a good shake.Vocals are also improved and I think this is again related to the quality of the sound stage, you can now clearly hear where the singer has been positioned in the mix.Overall I am so happy with this device. I'd read a lot of reviews before buying and the consensus was that this DAC can give other DACs costing over £1000 a real run for their money. I'll be spending my Xmas going through and rediscovering all my music collection again!