I'll start it off...

For a good few years now I have used a Linn Ikemi with a Chord DAC 64.  It sounds pretty good to me.  I have heard better of course but not at a price that would make me swap.  In fact although digital sound is improving, it seems to me that the premium for significant improvement is getting bigger rather than smaller.

A point of interest (hopefully) is that after being initially pleased with the improvement that the DAC 64 brought over the Ikemi’s own output, I started to get a vague impression that something wasn’t quite right with the sound of percussion and brass.  After much faffing, I decided to do a polarity check on the output and found it to be inverted.  This caused a bit of a fuss with Chord as they had, until then, not bothered to mention this detail in the manual or anywhere else (in fairness to Chord the DAC64 had only been out for a few months and their matching amplifier range was also polarity inverting).  Apparently though, no one could hear the difference – try telling that to someone who works in a recording studio.  Fortunately, the DAC 64 has balanced/XLR outputs so a pair of XLR (inverted) to RCA leads (with a balancing resistor on the unused pin) provided me with the correct polarity and the extra snap to the sound that this delivered.  Chord do make this clear now but I can't help thinking that there must be a few DAC64's in the world that are underperforming due to being connected RCA > RCA.