Very underrated DAC and a great price. A very good measure of power supply is weight. Note the UD-503 weighs nearly 10 lbs. The wiring for balanced headphone out is clearly diagrammed in the manual so any competent custom cable maker can make an adapter for you. You have 2 choices of balanced - standard and active ground. The latter is only half the power, but creates an amazingly low noise floor. Very feature rich - for example for the balanced XLR outputs, you can specify 2 or 3 pin (no ground, ground) to connect to any active speaker or amp. You also get upsampling to DSD and choice of numerous digital filters to tailor the sound. Overall sound is very much neutral so your headphones will sound like whatever the manufacturer intended. If you are looking for a colored sound to compliment/offset your headphones' characteristics, look elsewhere. If you do studio work, this is a great all in one unit.
California_kidTEAC is a strange company. They make cheap plastic boom boxes.. but also make great stuff like this DAC. I wonder if the "plastic boom box" version of TEAC turns people off from considering their better gear. It did that to me for awhile.
And then there is Esoteric, a subsidiary of TEAC which makes TOTL, world-class equipment.
BlueSkiesNot all that different from Sony if you think about it. But for sure, sound and video professionals are well acquainted with Teac and Sony. Part of the "stigma" of Teac is that they were synonymous with reel to reel tape players sort of like Xerox and copiers.