While I do not have "golden ears", I do have an appreciation for good price / performance gear. Here's what I know about this piece of gear - I can run it from my Macbook Pro or from my iPhone 8+ (with the 2nd gen Apple adapter) and it just works. I have it feeding a Massdrop Cavalli CTH amp and my Sennheiser HD6xx and Hifiman 4xx headphones - and I really like the way it all sounds. Am I getting that 99.99 percentile sound performance? No, but did I spend a reasonable amount of money to get 98 percentile performance? Yes!
cwelton17actually both of those amps come in two flavors, with an integrated SDAC and without (and the price difference is almost exactly the cost of the standalone SDAC). If I was doing it all over again, I would get the amp with the integrated SDAC, as I'm unlikely to ever need to upgrade the DAC portion.