spicyramen

While it's true that Android phones are essentially small computers, any custom drivers for the DAC will be an issue due to Android's linux heritage. I would imagine that none of the current phones will work with external dacs out of the box. But Android running custom ROMs can enable USB host-mode on certain devices, so people willing to experiment and root have already been hooking up external dacs to their devices successfully. Android recently introduced a new usb api with their latest version (ice cream sandwich) to allow host-mode without rooting, so my advice would be to wait until a better solution appears.

Hello, I don't have any experience with DCD-8, but thought i'd share my experience. My setup seems similar to yours, except I have a stax amp, not the awesome bhse. Also like you, at one point I had a xonar card feeding the berkely alpha dac (although I did achieve a stable asio setup at 192khz/24bit with the optical feed), but I moved on to the lynx aes16 anyway just to feed my audiophile addiction and to achieve some peace of mind. If I were you, I wouldn't drop *too* much money for the link between the pc & dac. While it's certainly important to limit jitter levels, to be perfectly honest, the difference I heard between the cheapo $120 xonar hdav slim and the ~$700 lynx was subtle at best, and this was when listening on my sr-007mk2 as well as on my main speaker rig, whose quality is quite good (and over 15 times the cost of my headphone rig.) So, my advice is to not overspend and look at various "cheaper" usb/firewire options you may come across, including the lynx option.

I've been *very* happy with my system which uses the Slim Devices Transporter (plus the "Controller" remote, identical to the one provided with the Duet) as the source, connecting to the Berkeley Alpha Dac. Even though the Transporter is more expensive than the Duet, as far as I can tell the *digital* output on both units provide the same sound quality. So, I don't think sound degradation is the issue, but you should be aware of the limited sample rate support of the Duet. Being able to playback 96kHz files is important to me (which is the main reason I still keep the Transporter in the chain, but there are cheaper ways to do this). That said, don't underestimate the convenience of the Controller remote. Once you get used to sitting back and using the scroll wheel to choose albums/tracks/playlists on its color display, it's really hard to go back to anything else...