I meant to return to this thread a while ago after my DAC bake-off but forgot so I'll just chuck me tuppence in. I don't know what the MDAC+ sounds like but I read a lot of reports and concluded I couldn't justify its price over the MDAC in terms of the added extras which are pretty worthless in my case. As someone said the retail of the MDAC is still surprisingly high so when I saw it for £525 it was a no-brainer. Also as Al Ears says if you want portability go for the Chord; I think a fairer contest would have been Audiolab vs Arcam, both standalone non-portables with very different sound characteristics.