You're missing ther point entirely Jason. I'm not talking about performance. If you have an Intel chip and an AMD chip of equal power, you could not know which chip you were running your programs on. This is the idea I'm trying to get across with the DACs. Many people on here think a DAC is a device in a box. You take it out of the box, you plug it into the mains and then plug it into the rest of your system. This is not a DAC. A DAC (and I cannot believe I'm saying this) is a Digital to Analog Converter. It's a small silicon chip with contact pins around it and it spits out bits of information to other circuits. These circuits take the waveform and process this, via many components, until it can be passed to amplifer stages. My argument is that this slice of silicon, costing about ten quid, has no intrinsic sound quality, but only supplies data for another component to eventually turn into sound. I think there are many on here blinkered by bling and see their Topping device as just the chip inside. There's more to it than that. If this fancy Topping Centaurus (good grief) had the AKM DAC inside it, I very much doubt anyone would be jumping up and down complaining, or rejoicing in the fact that Topping were not using the ESS chip as advertised. If Topping made this product with both ESS and AKM chips on the production line, with EVERYTHING else the same, I doubt anyone would notice any difference.