Nice review indeed.
Having owned AirDAC for a few weeks now, and having decided in favour of it with Pioneer N-50 as an alternative, I think one of the strengths of it is the simplicity: the fact that it does not have a remote (all inputs are automatically selected by the predefined priority order of the devices plugged/streaming into it and nothing more) or volume control (while some sort might make some sense). It's just a transparent high quality device in my setup.
It has actually made my stereo / TV setup simpler: I just pass the output of my Samsung plasma for all video related stuff via Toslink and stream music via UPnP (mostly) and AirPlay (sometimes).
I found a perfect friend for my AirDAC, and that is a Synology NAS. They have iPhone/iPad/Android/Web apps to manage your music library and stream it either via UPnP (preferred as it supports 24/96) or AirPlay. It works amazingly well and I can have album art, lyrics, playlists and everything else you might want from the music streaming app. As an added benefit, I am no longer dependant from the iDevice battery life as streaming is actually done from the Synology device to the AirDAC. An amazing teamwork I should say.
I find audio quality pleasing, however I have upgraded from my Energy C500s to Focal Electras almost at the same time so it's hard for me to compare AirDAC to any other source. I don't hear much difference from the iPhone but it is supposed to have a good quality DAC as well. I feel like now the bottleneck is my Marantz PM7001 amp and planning to try a tube amp in my setup.
My only remarks are:
- volume control over UPnP does not work for some 24/96 FLAC files
- gapless playback isn't supported for some files (no big deal)
Darius