Dac Technology Mature?

In short, "Yes" to the OP

But:
Tube DACs are still evolving, though at a slower rate than 10-20 years ago

SS Dacs will continue to diversify on tried and true principles, but now with more hybrid designs (not just tube/SS, but now SS and Class D) and now incorporating more R2R designs

Class D is as mature as it has ever been right now, but will continue to get better as the tech progresses (eg, from primordial switching tech to ICE modules, to NCORE modules TOTL)

That said, I found an old Sony CD/DVD player from 2000. MSRP = $3000, mine for $40. has a R2R CD DAC and is just a smidge below the SQ of my $3000 Sim CDP (2005) and $5000 Bel Canto 3.7 DAC (2015)

whitestix298 posts08-04-2018 10:08pm

improvement over, for example, the internal DAC in the Oppo 205.  

Hmm, I thought my Oppo 105 sounded excellent (pretty sure it has the identical dac section as the 205) until I replaced my preamp with an Audio Alchemy DDP-1 Dac/Pre, just for the pre, but once I got around to trying the DAC portion I was shocked that the AA DAC was light years ahead

I did own a California Audio Labs delta sigma some 30 years ago.

IMHO, one of the main issues/obstacles is the transmission line from trans> dac> pre. One of the few cable mfgs who actually knows what he's talking about is WireWorld. His Mini Eclipse series is a serious bargain, as are his power cords

Another is how well the AC is filtered. I have a Core Power Tech 1800 plugged into a 20 amp dedicated line 

As someone who's done a complete 180 over the past few years to jump fully back to vinyl because of my dissatisfaction with digital, I for one, sure hope DAC technology is not mature.  In our frequent get togethers, just about every person raves over our even mid level analog rigs providing much better sound and happiness than most of the highly touted digital implementations we also own

Chord seems to have the only new DAC technology making an appearance with its DAVE & upsampler taking on the $100,000 plus DACs at a fraction of the price. It appears to be an updated version of what made Wadia famous in its day that everyone else has given up on as an approach. Alan Sircom, the editor of HIFI+ prefers DAVE to the big boys.

Great analogue stages really matter, but apparently, the great tube gear designers aren’t going there. i.e. could you imagine one designed by Vladimir Lamm?

768 might make a meaningful difference that may get people to start paying attention but I suspect it will be a multiple of even that number, that will bring back some semblance of the resolution available on really, really good vinyl playback. Sceptics here need to make the comparison before saying otherwise.

Any discussion about DAC Technology should include the developments made by Rob Watts and John Franks of Chord Electronics. Custom Coded FPGA chips with over 500k lines of code replace off the shelf DAC chips. Thier new Hugo TT 2 also receives the benefit of an upgrade from 4-element design to a 10-element design, which works in harmony with the radically upgraded FPGA and code.  In comparison to the 256-tap filters that traditional chip DACs may run, Hugo TT 2’s more powerful Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA, custom-coded by Chord Electronics’ Rob Watts, with 86x 208MHz cores running in parallel to create an advanced 16FS WTA 1 filter with 98,304-taps. That horsepower does more than just connect the dots of data to create an analog waveform, it creates a soundscape.