This is a review and detailed measurements of the Mola Mola Tambaqui USB DAC and Ethernet streamer. It is on kind loan from a member which is quite special when you consider it costing US $11,500 (£8,999).As it should be the Tambaqui weights a lot relative to its size with generous use of free-form thick metal enclosure:You really feel like you have a high-end audio product until you touch it. The corners and edges are all extremely sharp. Not that you are going to handle it by hand but I always like to see the edges burnished at least, if not rounded.There is a lot of connectivity as there should be in this price range:Of special interest is standard Ethernet network streaming with certified Roon endpoint. Shame they don't emphasize this more.The user interface is unique. Four buttons to select each input with a default volume setting. I must be dumb because I could not find a way to change the volume. I had to use the remote. There is either a problem with the remote or the unit in that trying to change the volume by 1 dB was very challenging. It would keep jumping up 2 dB or down 2 dB.I did not need any drivers to use it on Windows. And simply connecting the Ethernet cable allowed instant streaming from Roon player. Nice.The Mola Mola Tambaqui is a boutique DAC in that it implements its own DAC. It upsamples the incoming rate to a very high rate DSD and then converts that PWM signal to analog. Often we see such reinventions of the wheel as performing worse. Let's see if this is the case here.As usual, we start with our dashboard with USB input:As indicated, I dialed down to volume to get 4.3 volts (next step was below 4 volt) for proper comparison to other DACs with 4 volt output. Our focus immediately goes to incredibly low distortion and resulting SINAD (sum of distortion and noise relative to our signal) of 121 dB. This by a hair beats our best of the best DAC before:In case you are missing it, it is the yellow bar all the way to the left.A bit odd though is the clock running a bit slow. Instead of 1 kHz, it is showing 0.99996 kHz. No, it is not remotely an audible thing but a bit odd that the clock is not as accurate as the rest of the unit. I may want to set my watch to it and I can't!Mola Mola advertises signal to noise ratio of 130 dB. We don't quite get that:They likely manually subtract the noise of the analyzer to get to the 130 dB. So no concern there.We see the same low noise floor impressing us in Intermodulation distortion relative to level:32-tone signal representing "music" shows incredibly low amount of distortion:There is talk of how great jitter is on this unit and we do get excellent results but some power supply related components remain:They can easily be ignored at levels below 140 dB.Linearity is the star here showing perfect performance:120 dB/20 bits of accuracy is shown with ease.Reconstruction filter shows a rather slow filter:This results in some aliasing in ultrasonic domain:That normally hurts THD+N versus frequency but there is some other issue at hand:Expected to see a flat line at lower level than shown.I will test the headphone performance in a future post.The Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC shows again that just because a DAC is designed from ground up, it need not perform poorly. It is actually the opposite with it performing at the top of the class with respect to distortion and noise.Since I am not the one paying for it for you to purchase it, it is not my issue to worry about the cost. As such,------------As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.I just bought a new Pink Panther. These things, I mean animals, cost a fortune! So please help me with the cost byusing