High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.

Hear, hear. 😄
No real need to upsample to dizzying heights. 16bit is good enough. Always has been. It's just taken technology time to catch up with the science behind it. Although, a recording engineer told me that 96 is the better way to go than 44.1 but it's not a deal breaker.

All the best,
Nonoise

If Tidal offers same album: 44.1/16 and 96/24 (MQA). I will stream MQA. Of course, all through delta-sigma DAC. If I had a very good R2R dAC (16 or 20 bit), then I would try native R2R. I don't know if there is an affordable 24bit R2R DAC yet.

Agree. The Redbook standard was likely sufficient all along. Just needed a good DAC to properly decode it. Low-jitter transports also contributed to this realization. 

Yes for me it is low jitter, better differential linearity and less noise with 6 bit sigma delta DACs that are the reason for recent improvements in sound.

Upsampling helps randomize differential non-linearity.

As usual, noise is always assumed to be random and if high enough it can be all filtered out. The reality is that it is rarely perfectly random. Just like jitter, if it was simply all random then it would never have been a problem to begin with.

R2R has its merits as a technology but is limited in resolution due to differential non-linearity. 6 bit delta sigma DACs are kind of hybrid between old single bit sigma delta and R2R.

That said DSD is still a highly elegant approach especially at 4x or higher, as it inherently has great linearity and then noise is pushed way up and far out of the way.

It seems that DAC chips do suffer from everything being crammed together on a chip. So discrete DACs like PS Audio DS and others seem to have a more analog sound even if their measured performance is not as impressive as the latest Sabre based DAC.

Lots of ways to skin a c@t!

I don't know if there is an affordable 24bit R2R DAC yet.

Affordable is of course different for everyone but my MHDT Lab Pagoda (PCM1704) sells for about $1300 and does 24/192 natively. Sounds wonderful.