My experience is pretty much the same as aquashankar with my M3TI's purchased in Sept 2001. I originally replaced giant full sized speakers to accommodate a 700 sq foot cottage. At the time I didn't think they were equal to the giant speakers but I understood that physics played a big part in speaker design and the trade off was worth it for reclaimed floor space.

My next house was bigger but the living room was a rectangle with the listening area on the short side so I just added a Axiom sub to the speakers and was happy there.

After that I moved to a loft and added Axiom center and rears to finally have a full fledged surround system. The Axiom's sounded great in the living area of a 1100 sq foot loft.

3 years ago I moved to a house with a cavernous living room that has 17' ceilings. I upgraded everything to an all white set consisting of M22's, EP350 and a VP150 (no rear speakers due to wiring issues). The M3ti's went into the closet mostly because in the latest move the tweeter was dinged.

I decided to order a replacement tweeter from Axiom (which they matched for me) and put them into service on my desktop with my Peachtree MusicBox Integrated amp. Wow! I couldn't believe how great they sounded near field. I could also sit in a chair across the room and they still sounded great. I made some speaker risers/stands out of a reclaimed red oak mantle by sending it through a planer then cutting to size with a radial arm saw followed by sanding and sealing. I also added thick cork to help with resonance on the desktop and blutac to the speaker bottoms for stability. Raising the M3ti's tweeters to ear height really made them shine. A much bigger sound improvement than I thought would happen.

Next update was a Schiit Eitr with Modi Multibit DAC (finally getting around the to OP's topic of using M3 with new dac). Another big leap in the quality of sound coming out of the M3ti's. The musicality through iTunes/bitperfect or Roon is so engaging that I don't have upgradeitis and I can be happy with what I have. I might be able to do a fraction better with a higher end speaker, amp/dac but I'm sure the point of diminishing returns will come into play because I bet I'd have to spend 10 times as much as on this combo. Especially considering I'm using 17 year old speakers dug out of my closet.

I just posted a shot of this setup on Head-fi: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/pictures...5#post-14342412