Hello there! Answering this question from a while ago, I bought a used (<$1.3k) Exogal Comet Plus that arrived in the mail yesterday!
First off, I want to say a huge thank you to @Nick_Mimi who was willing to answer several of my questions about this DAC before I pulled the trigger on buying it—seriously, I really appreciate it. You’re awesome!
I’ve gotten less than a day’s worth of listening so far, but jumping to the Exogal from the Bifrost 2, I’m immediately hearing obviously more detail, even from things like YouTube videos so not even just from good sources, and I’m hearing much more coherent imaging. But despite the extra detail, the sound isn’t sharp /at all/. It’s still a very natural sound and so the DAC really doesn’t draw attention to itself. You just kind of fall into it and get used to it, enough so that I could imagine someone else picking this up and being a bit underwhelmed that it’s not more exciting or something. But I’ve been very happy with the sound so far.
In terms of on-paper usability, the Exogal also ticked a lot of my boxes: I needed something that was going to sound good over both balanced and single-ended, something that could output both balanced/single-ended simultaneously to two different amps, and something that would perform well over USB. In practice, the Exogal hits most of those but…
…um, the USB has been a journey. At first, it wouldn’t play nice with my work MacBook Pro at all, but through some series of installing software, mucking with the built-in Audio MIDI Setup, and speaking magical incantations, /something/ clicked and the Exogal now plays totally fine with my work machine. But once I got over that hurdle, holy cow my USB input was passing a lot of noise. I could literally unplug the DAC from the wall, and my Quicksilver was still picking up very audible noise just being plugged into the Exogal while it was plugged in over USB.
Unplugging every other USB input from my machine reduces the noise substantially, but yeah, expect me to make another post in this thread in a couple days going “hey, my USB isolator arrived,” lol. Also interestingly, the RNHP barely picks up any of the USB noise, even over the same RCA output, so it’s different with different amps.
Okay, I’ve rambled enough, time to listen to more music!