You’ve sorted through two pages of posts that push to one core assessment of the “best” DAC ….. it depends entirely on your bespoke system .
So what makes a good DAC choice when you are assessing options blindly without personal auditions and just reading the confusing reviews….. or distilling down all these confusing and oft conflicting posts ?
Then think about the following DAC design and DAC build factors. .
Too many believe that the magic silver bullet to a good converter lies in just choosing a “high-end” flavor -of-the-month converter chip. Sure …. Top end chip is a first good step and many have it as their first marketing post, (with some competing OEM brand overlap / commonalities …) but it’s nowhere near the key core differentiation factors.
Rather, we know that the essence of the musicality also resides in the line signal processing stages, the power supplies (transformers, filtering, regulation, and preferably linear… ), the digital signal processing before conversion, the quality of the key components: clocks, transistors, capacitors, op amps, etc.
Build Quality matters and yes .,, it’s gonna intuitively cost ya more.Buying cheap here is a significant compromise.
PS.,,, Ensure you like the digital interface / app in a streamer section if it’s included in the DAC, Some of the OEM software choices are dodgy, and/or have crappy support , or worse. And some are truly excellent point and click delights.