Yeah! Let us see the FM's response. Me too thinking about it long since.
Iam having meridian explorer headphone DAC which I tried with my Marantz sr5008 AVR and it's own.
Both are in different league. Sound signature is different. So I couldn't make out much as iam happy with both of them.
Yes It is how the classification of DACs should be...
There are many DAC recommendation threads, but this reviewer seems more straightforward especially when he says ..
"if you're getting a dac higher than a certain value, it's either doing something different for the sake of being different - or it's doing something wrong."