It depends a lot on how well your DAC handles jitter and or how it reclocks the data. If it handles it well then the slimdevices do very well and there is actually little (no) sonic difference between them. Using the built-in DAC's only the transporter is competitive with a good outboard DAC. IMO. I guess two SB3's, one transporter, two receivers, one controller and one Boom doesn't qualify as "Hard-Core".