My guess is Schiit’s revamped Modi 3+ is impressive. They’ve made quantum leaps in performance with all their latest models. Their Unison USB solution is also very handy.
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The Atom Stack is nice! I have one. I also bought another atom amp that I paired with an E30.
I may be posting up the complete Atom stack soon, but only because I’ve acquired other’s and I need to make room.
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@Delta9K Curious to know what, if any, differences you heard with Atom stack vs the Atom with e30. I had that before pairing the e30 with the Asgard. Liked it ok, but I prefer the Asgard, tho the Atom seemed to provide more kick in the low end, tho piano attack was sometimes too edgy. With Sundaras, perhaps not with other phones.
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Honestly the E30 vs Atom DAC paired with the Atom amp, there was not a lot of difference that I could tell. Even when using the filter options that the E30 has. However, my ears are nowhere near golden. What I can say is that sonically, there was not enough difference to justify the $30 difference in price. Feature set wise perhaps, if you need or wanted more input options and/or a remote. The E30 got boxed back up and is sitting on a shelf while the Atom stack (DAC/Amp) is still in use. If that’s anything to go by. The headphones I had available to me at the time I was testing and doing A/B with the two DACs (Atom/E30) were Focal Elegia, Sivga Phoenix & Sivga 004, and Phillips X2HRs. For each set I liked the native Atom stack over the E30/Atom stack.
Currently the Atom stack in the office is still paired with an Elegia and I enjoy that match-up. The only reason I would displace that stack is because I now have a better DAC that is homeless (Modius) and it needs a home. I’ll be pairing the Modius with the Atom amp I bought to go with the E30 that I’m not using.
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Yes, those inputs are nice to have. I plan to use the E30 as DAC/preamp paired with some Edifier active speakers on another setup, specifically because of the optical input and remote.
Enjoy!
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Should be great. You enjoy as well…that’s what this is all about after all! 
Liquid Spark amp VS JDS Atom amp comparison
AKA “why frequency graphs are worthless” (these two amps measure pretty much exactly the same, and have the exact same horizontal, ultra-flat frequency response).
I had the JDS Atom (amp) for more than a year, but needed another headphone amp, so I thought, why not try the Liquid Spark instead. First impression? They sound the same. So, bye! Ok no:
TL,DR: I don’t know if the Atom amp is too clear, or the Liquid Spark is too veiled, or both. The JDS Atom seems to give me more information, in every possible way.
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The JDS Labs Atom got more horizontal AND vertical soundstage (width and height). Some singers tend to sound like they’re “on a stage” (higher in front of you) with the Atom, but they’ll sound like they’re in front of you, at eye level, with the Liquid Spark, for example. So, yes, the JDS Atom is brighter. But bass and sub-bass, on the JDS Atom, also sound like it’s coming from “under” you, less so on the Liquid Spark. Basically, bass extend lower and treble extend higher on the JDS Atom.
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I really feel like, if you want this 3D effect, this “holographic-ness” some people talk about, only the JDS Atom can give you this, and the Liquid Spark, in comparison, will hurt the soundstage and the “3D effect”, and may make intense or extreme music sound more “crowded” (every sound is more “in your face” horizontally and vertically, and the Liquid Spark doesn’t give em “space”). You hear more of the room with the JDS Atom amp. The JDS Atom seems to give me more information, in every possible way.
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If you tried “Class A” amps, but it’s too “smooth” for you, or too… different, the Liquid Spark is a great choice, without “coloring” the sound as much as Class A amps (compared to the Class D amplification technology most consumers know and use). But… originally, everything was Class A. So, is Class D “coloring” the sound by making it too extreme, too “mechanical” and “robotic”-sounding?
If you have planars, well, I noticed something interesting with the Liquid Spark “gain” switch: It’s a sub-bass boost for my T50RPs. It does practically nothing for my other, non-planar headphones. But for T50RPs, it adds a ton of bass and lower mids. Might be useful for those who want T50RPs, but don’t want to “mod” em, if only by messing with the foams and changing the pads, like I did.
If you have a few headphones with a bit too much treble for you, the Liquid Spark is worth trying. The entire frequency range seem “tilted clockwise” (more bass and sub-bass, less treble, less sibilance). So, even if your first impression is “I can’t hear the difference”, your ears will thank you for choosing the Liquid Spark because the “esses” are smoother – well, everything is smoother. So you’ll be able to listen to music longer, and get all the “liveliness” that treble boost gives, without finding it tiring (or headbang to metal with the volume a bit higher than usual… hmm this could be dangerous). On the opposite, again, with headphones with too much treble for you, if you listen to music for a few minutes a day and want everything to feel impactful, alive, intense, the JDS Atom amp is your choice.
Pairing is everything: The JDS Atom can make your headphones sound like a robot, the Liquid Sparks’ smoothness can make high octave voices feel lifeless, and everything sound like it’s recorded in a tinier, more closed space. If your headphones, or even your DAC, feel “lifeless” and lack energy, get the JDS Atom. If you have headphones with (too?) big soundstage, but too much treble, you might want to try the Liquid Spark. As I have a ton of electronic and metal music in my playlist, my next step is to pair the Liquid Spark with an ESS DAC to see if it can “inject” more energy and soundstage into it, without sounding… “painfully accurate” like the Atom amp sometimes does with “treble-y” headphones. Or buy an Asgard 3 or a Magnius or a Lake People or… 
(Now it’s time to copy-paste this in the Liquid Spark thread and hide, lol)
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Quick question. My current chain is Liquid Spark DAC --> JDS Atom --> Drop CTH --> LCD2 (mainly). My question is: does the preamp section of the Atom color the sound at all, or is it passthrough? Seems to me like it is altering the sound slightly (not necessarily in a bad way), but that may just be the gain difference. I’m mainly using this so I can allow a little more usage of the CTH volume adjustment for fine tuning–otherwise I can only go up to 9-10 o’clock.
Hmm, yeah, you’re double-amping and it’s not the best. It’s not a pass-through, it’s a pre-amplifier. It will definitely do weird things. Better get a splitter or just RCA Y-cables instead (you’ll get distortion on one amp if the second one is off, though, with Y-cables – both must be on, even if you just use one).
JDS Labs Atom review: The 100$ audio microscope.
(A bit of copy-pasting here, I had this amp for one year, but I thought it would help if I’d put my thoughts and ramblings in one cohesive review)
I originally bought this amp mainly for my T50RPs, after discovering my old Note 3 was not powerful enough for these (lol). And yup, that’s what these needed. Holy effing bass. Extended, powerful, intense… skull-shaking bass if you want. And not only with planars.
Maybe this amp should just be called a “depth/width and detail multiplier”. As my first headphone amp, it added depth and width (soundstage) to everything. I’ll use “transparency” the wrong way here, but, I was about to say “transparency” instead of “depth”, because every sound… has its own space now. So… instrument separation?
I also have the the sAp-1 amp, which is “technically Class A” (a 270mW Class A headphone amp). In comparison, it lacks treble (male/female voices high notes, high guitar notes etc.) And above all lacks soundstage. It… just does not give you soundstage, compared to the Atom. But it sounds reaaally smooth. I could say the same for the Liquid Spark, but it would be really disrespectful to the Liquid Spark, lol. Liquid Spark is an in-between, but way better than the sAp-1.
Originally, I was just double-amping my AVR with the Atom, because I had no other choice. And still, this amp made the same thing it does with a desktop DAC. Even without a DAC, this amp will just… find every tiny detail it can and amp it. The JDS Atom amplifier is a horizontal soundstage, vertical soundstage, depth and detail multiplier. Still, “garbage in, garbage out”. Plugged into my no-name motherboards’ sound card, music sounded… empty and soulless, lol. It’s like you’re amping the void. You can’t amp detail that’s not there! 
But when you’ll find a good source… you’ll know it. Atom is a great name for this product, and maybe that was the idea all along, because the JDS Labs Atom is a 100$ audio microscope.
A good source:
As my first desktop DAC, I had the Sanskrit 10th last month, and I must say I was really, really impressed by this pairing. For, like, 200$, the JDS Atom amp + Sanskrit 10th DAC combo will give you a taste of what audiophiles with 1000$+ dacs, amps and headphones talk about when they say “holographic” and “3D” environment. Hell, even using my PS3 as a source (CD Player, RCA out), I got into this “audio uncanny valley” where “everything sounds real but Sublime is not playing in my room”. So, yeah… this sounds a bit more thrilling than “this DAC/amp combo sounds clean”, huh! Especially for 200$, lol.
If you want that “AKM warmth” (bass and mids emphasized), but all the detail, no “mud” whatsoever (mud… huh, let’s translate that to “no hard to decipher mids and low-mids whatsoever”), but also need coax or optical or… something that shows the Khz (the JDS Atom DAC has an AKM chipset, but does not give you coax/optical or a sample rate indicator), the Sanskrit 10th paired with a JDS Atom amplifer is a great choice. And the Sanskrit 10th is also available in blue and red! 
Warnings:
Be careful about this tiny little plastic “gain” button switch. Unlike the Liquid Spark switch, which is pretty much useless (only adds a few decibels), this switch multiplies the volume. Example:
Also, I’ve been told the JDS Atom amp got standard protection against static schocks, but to be sure, if you unplug RCA cables: Get rid of the planar headphones you have on your head, ground yourself somewhere, and then unplug the RCA cables. Otherwise, I grilled mine after touching the RCA ins. I learned the hard way that planar headphones are static schock amplifiers. Did I had to buy another one? No way: I sent em an e-mail, and in one hour they replied to me saying “yes it’s on warranty, send it back to (address including RMA number)”. Excellent customer service.
Final thoughts:
Maybe being an “audiophile” is wayyy cheaper than I thought, after all. 
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AKM chips do not do this. If you “hear” that in listening, it’s because of another variable in the chain, or placebo. If you’re hearing a dac change the sound signature of what you’re listening to, it’s trash and should be tossed.
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Most people here will tell you otherwise. Anyway, as I said, this is my first desktop DAC, so I can’t compare to ESS or others (yet). All I can say (personally) is, compared to everything else I have, yes, the mids and bass are emphasized.
It’s either the DAC, or anything else inside this little box, including the DAC implementation, but whatever. Maybe it would be better to say most AKM dac implementations can sound smooth, and bad ESS dac implementations can sound shrill (and at this price, that’s what you’ll get). This AKM dac implementation is really impactful and bassy, the AKM dac in my 10-year-old Denon AVR is not, it’s just smooth but lacking bass. A lot. So yeah, my AVR is tossed, in favor of the Sanskrit 10th. 
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I’ve had lots of fun upgrading dacs, from an ol dac,el dac,enog2, bifrost2, to a qutest. The ol dac was pretty basic and just bumped the resolution up a bit, but the other dacs provided their own sound, but also more resolution. The bf2 for example provided a smooth/warmth to it. Really helped with harsher audio sources, as well as harsher headphones and amps.
With that being said, your statement about dacs dont change the sound,throw away etc, is incorrect there bud
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Change the sound signature from what? DACs are a source component that take a binary code that represents an audio signal and decodes into an analog signal that makes sense to human brains. In that sense they don’t so much change the sound signature so much as they are the first component to begin to define the sound signature of the signal chain in which they happen to be connected. Since essentially no end listener has access to the sound that occurred in the studio and live performances have limited attendance by nature, listeners don’t really have a way to meaningfully judge how a DAC is changing the incoming “sound signature” (if that term even makes sense when we’re talking about a stream of 1s and 0s, I’m on the fence on that question) from what was recorded and then digitally encoded. So if 2 DACs sound different, how is the end listener able to determine which one, or if both, changed the signature? We can’t solely rely on measurements for that determination either. Just about any decently designed and made dac these days measures horizontally on FR sweeps and has distortion numbers lower than human auditory systems can detect. On what basis do we make decisions on which dac should be tossed?
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Currently I own HD 660s. Would the element II be a noticeably better amp/dac than the atom dac/amp stack?
Is the atom amp … an op-amp based
Or a discrete amplifier
I am looking to pair the A3 with a EL2 dac. Will post my findings once I have the combo
I just found this. If you use the RCA out, gain off + volume knob to the max. will give you something “virtually identical” to a passthrough. Yes, “unity gain” means “low gain”.
…just remember to look at the volume knob before plugging headphones in. 
(…or get power-hungry T50RPs so it will be pretty much normal listening volume lol)
Very interesting, thanks. I still have mine, even tho now using Asgard 3.