Paid $400 in February for a refurbished model, becoming a fan of buying refurbished, you know they checked the item more thoroughly than when new out of the factory, my product included all the paperwork & extras. Very pleased with my Sabaj D5. As a previous big speakers, big amp guy recently moved into a rented Town home with shared walls after owning my own home, seemed like the neighborly thing to do.
The novelty of not having to turn on my Parasound A21 amplifier to listen to detailed, balanced, clear, exhilarating music has yet to wear off. Whether Streaming from Spotify @320, listening to my lossless iTunes library, my CD collection or even Internet radio via my Cambridge 851N the experience is pleasurable the sound satisfying.
As a previously wanna-be Audiophile I know i am missing some highs, lows & sounds I can't possibly hear through my Sennheiser HD 600 headphones & Sabaj D5, 'don't care, what I am hearing sounds good, I hear greater detail that was lost (to me) when listening to big sound through big speakers. I intend exploring a better Headphone amp & likely Headphones in the future, right now this item sounds great, no issues.

Good unit. Measures out of this world, a truly transparent dac/amp. Dac is crazy good. Amplifier very good, useful for most headphones. I think you want something else if you have crazy sensitive iems or REALLY power hungry planars.
Unit feels great with nice heft and the lcd screen is pretty good (although I wish you could manually adjust color way). Volume wheel looks very nice but feels a little cheap. It has 1-1.5mm of give on either direction before it clicks for the next increment, so you can literally wobble it back and forth.
Remote is acceptable but not awesome. My Vanatoo speakers for $300 come with a very nice remote, too many of these $500 dac/amps come with the same very cheap remote control.
Good not spectacular. 4 out of 5 stars.

Barely drives my Dan Clark Audio Aeon RTs which are very low impedence to loud enough levels ... this is a good thing because it's easy to damage your ears with hi end, clear sounding gear. Without distoriton the ears can handle a lot more sound. Be careful.

I prefer the Jotunheim 2 which came out days after this arrived at my place. I bought one and preferred it to this one although it was a little more, the Jot comes with a multibit dac that is superior to the ESS and the amplifier is far and above the Saraq. The saraq is a fine deal I just think the Jot is even better.

This is quite the DAC. I had a hard time picking it over the SMSL M500. The Sabaj D5 would be a category killer if there was a LINE OUT feature to bypass the volume control. Reviews say this unit runs hot. They must have fixed that because this unit warms up like any standard piece of audio gear. I had been driving a NAIM integrated amp and a pair of Rega speakers with a $30 bluetooth/DAC RCA outputs streaming Spotify through a Windows 10 laptop. I thought I would upgrade that bluetooth segment before evaluating the various improved streaming services like Idagio and Primephonic. In general, sure, there is a definite improvement in sound quality but a streamed aria or violin section through a DAC still has that flinty hard edge sound at the top. I don't think a 4X the price DAC from Germany would get me away from that. My next upgrade will be a hybrid tube preamp. IMHO this DAC is a pretty nice piece of gear.

For the price it can't be a beat. Excellent DAC in its own right employing the sota DAC chip. Sound is very good for what you pay with excellent build quality.