This is a review and detailed measurements of the Mytek Liberty USB DAC and Headphone Amplifier. It is on kind loan from a member. The Liberty costs US $995.While the departure from typical aluminum enclosures was nice, I did not care for the very sharp edges of the front bezel:The LED lights dance in ways I could not always figure out. Otherwise you push click to select inputs.The back panel is what you expect:I was disappointed that the RC inputs were not color coded and one could not see the Right or Left writing looking from front above.I am sure someone will tell me what the external DC jack is doing there when the unit has AC input. I used that for all of my testing.I installed the drivers for the unit while it was plugged it. It was happy, told me to reboot, only to not have it be recognized by Windows. I disconnected it and then installed again and it worked this time.There is a nice control panel which gives you status of selected input, volume, etc. which is much more intuitive than the front panel because you have no indication of volume there! Speaking of volume control, it is too linear and slow for headphone usage. You had to turn and turn it to make a meaningful difference in volume.Overall, it is fine and does the job.As usual we start with our dashboard:As noted, I dialed down the volume by 2 dB to get 4 volt output and make comparison to other DACs fair and proper. In doing so, our distortion and noise rating of 105 is good but way below what it should be for a $1000 DAC:Second harmonic distortion is at -109 dB which after addition of some noise brings SINAD down to 105 per above.Likewise, signal to noise ratio was disappointing for class:IMD versus level shows the problem with noise:Not good to get beat by a $250 product (Topping DX3 Pro).Jitter performance was very good although the higher noise floor covers many sins:Multitone test oddly shows more distortion at low frequencies than high:Same appears in THD+N versus frequency:Linearity was disappointing again for the class:We have $100 DACs which do better than this.Let's start with power into 300 ohm load:That elevated noise gets us here as well. Distortion rises too high as well. But the Liberty delivers on power with 265 milliwatts, enabling to drive just about any high impedance headphone.Switching to 33 ohm load, we see a similar situation:Plenty of power but at the cost of noise and distortion.Baseline noise level is too high for sensitive IEMs/headphones:I started testing with my Drop Ether CX low impedance headphone. There was plenty of power here to drive them to satisfactory level with very good fidelity.Same situation was there with Sennheiser HD-650 headphones. Excellent performance was had with both so I don't think you will have any subjective issues using this DAC and headphone amp with most headphones.It seems some DAC companies still live in a world where there are not massive number of well performing DACs around. JA in stereophile remarked that -106 dB is superb. Well, it is not in this day and age. That is just 7 dB better than a $9 Apple USB-C phone dongle! So it is not as much as the Liberty being broken but the fact that it does not strive high enough to be competitive at nearly $1000.Subjectively the headphone amplifier is powerful to overcome any weakness in the upstream sections. So if you own it, and this is your use scenario, then stay with it. Otherwise for new purchases,------------As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.Our dogs are getting jealous that the panthers are getting all the attention. One is getting so bad that she has become totally depressed. So have to take him to get acupuncture. Yes, there is such a thing for dogs. It is expensive though so so pleaseusing