The DAC in the 818v3 is considerably better than the DAC in the 818v2 on conventional material and, in my view, competes with the best DACs in the world at the moment regardless of price. My experience of the digital outputs of the 818v2 is zero (I never ran it in this mode) but I do run the 818v3 into 7200SEs and it works extremely well.

I would strongly recommend going the whole hog and upgrading to 808v6 rather than stopping at v5 - the upgrade is very significant.


Streaming: Roon, NUC, QNAP869 NAS
2ch system: dCS Vivaldi, Audionet Stern, Audionet Heisenberg, Magico Q1
Retro system: 101/104/105, Red Rose Spirit