Is there any such thing as a bad sounding DAC these days?

@chervokas 

Thanks, very interesting, I did not know that.

our ears and our brains are breaking down incoming complex waveforms into their component frequencies very much like an FFT, and, further, actually converting them into binary-like neural spikes -- when a stereocilia bundle is deflected it creates a nerve spike or no spike, functionally like a 1 or a 0

So, if I'm reading you correctly you are saying that our brains re-convert (analog) sound waves into digital?

FFT is a mathematical transformation from time to frequency domain. Our ears respond to frequencies over time. The details of how they do that is a whole different story.  chervokas  seems to have a good handle on it.

So, if I’m reading you correctly you are saying that our brains re-convert (analog) sound waves into digital?

It’s not really digital, though Susan Rogers, who was Prince’s recording engineer then went on to get a PhD in music cognition and psychoacoustics and now is the director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory, quaintly does describe our stereocilia as the inner ear’s little A to D converters. There are aspects of our hearing and our auditory processing that are like analog audio signal processing, and aspects that are like digital audio signal processing. Better to say that our ears convert mechanical motion into nerve impulses and those nerve impulse are generated when little channels open and let ions flood in, and those channels are either open or closed, and that train of either/or electrochemical impulses are the stuff the higher order areas of our brain uses to form a perception of the sound -- Psychoacoustics: Hair Cells in Ears are Analog-to-Digital Converters | Susan Rogers | Berklee Online

@curiousjim 

Looking again, I no longer see a used one listed. They are an Aqua dealer so you could conceivably get a new one and return it if you can stomach/afford the restocking fee. 

FFT is a mathematical transformation from time to frequency domain. Our ears respond to frequencies over time. The details of how they do that is a whole different story.  chervokas  seems to have a good handle on it.

Not to derail the thread, but one of the cool things about our hearing that's different than a Fourier Transform is that, yes, we process the separate frequency components of the complex wave separately, but we process them at the same time that we process the timing, because, at least up to about 5kHz, the nerve impulses generated by the movement of the stereocilia are phase locked to the input wave,  so our hearing is simultaneously using information about which location on the basilar membrane/which hair cells/which neurons are being activated and also the phase locked/timing neural spike pattern of that activity.