Yeah, I'm not against spending money on audio equipment, but the vast majority of that money should go towards good speakers and headphones rather than things that don't make a difference. Not because it bothers me, because who am I, but because people would get more out of their money that way.

I really respect your edit, by the way. Rock on. And the DAC thing we can just disagree on and still be friends. With even a moderately decent sample rate, the DACs job is trivial, and it really makes no difference. If you can hear a difference, it's because one of the DACs is either doing something more than being a DAC or is broken and polluting the output.