As a neophyte I take from the ASR review that the DAC's suck but otherwise the box itself, for $600, isn't terrible. Middling performance at best but as others there pointed out, $600 for what is in the package ain't bad. I don't know enough about what I'm looking at though to say one way or the other if the problems mentioned are audible. Seems like there was debate on that particularly if you were expected to crank it up or not.
Frankly, the problem signs for me are the poor QC and terrible firmware bugs from first glance. I don't know what teams they put on what products but clearly they let slip past what, to me, seem like easy to test for scenarios. I take it these DAC issues can't be "updated" via firmware releases out of the system in any way?