Thanks for your advice. And YES, I do really need a sub for the type of music that I listen to, which is 75% electronica (house,trance,techno...everything on di.fm high bandwidth streaming). I can only feel the bass on my feet with the M80 in my 3400 cubic family, but with a sub it turn my room into a club. IMO I think the M80 sounds best with the EP500, but without a sub I just can't listen to it long enough; it wouldn't excite me.
Also, yeah I read alot about the Benchmark DAC and Wavelength Brick, which I initially considered. Eventually, I opt for a different route because I'm just starting out on this DAC journey and wanted to experiment a little. I figured for the price of a Benchmark or Wavelenght I can get two reasonable DACs like MDHT Constanstine+ ($400) for solid state and MDHT Paradisea+ ($575) or maybe a Scott Nixon ($575) for the tube curiosity in my setup, which total to $300 or more cheaper. Now, with two DACs and two laptops I can essentially customize my setup in a similiar fashion as a Slim Devices or any of those dedicated devices, but more functional for my uses.
BTW- if you use a PC with the DAC I would highly recommend Vista, because I just tested my DAC with Windoze XP, Vista, and SuSE Linux. Vista sounds great with the elimination of "Kmixer" and ease of configuration. Windoze XP sounds good, but not great and alot of configuration involved, SuSE Linux sounds lifeless with less bass then the other two OS(what a dissappointment for me I was hoping it sounds better or the same as XP, since SuSE is my primary OS). It sounds so strange to me that I would say anything positive about Vista, since I am strictly a UNIX guy in IT.
Anyway,I just got my M22 and been tied up with setup and have not had much time to fiddle with my DAC setup. I got to setup the M22*EP500 5.1 so my kids can watch "Baby Eienstien" and "Barney". My three years old daughter love to watch Barney over and over again and she force me to watch it with her, which drives me absolutely nutz!
