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

@stuartk 

I was surprised at the price, as it’s over $1000 LESS than retail!  Unless something has changed,  it was supposed to go for around $10,000 here. I haven’t sprung it on my wife yet, but there’s no time like the present.😉😉

My first DAC was a Scott Nixon USB. It was limited to 44k/16, but sounded very good. 

@mapman ....  Considering 'all of the above'...*ah* Yeah...*L*

Contrasted to speaker cables, lifted or no, IC's, USBees', and the conduit that one trips over on it's way to the breaker box....X the $'s to determine such.... ;)

(Rude, but bare with....😏...)  Audio gear and underwear have details in common.

It needs to be 'comfy' enough to forget, because if it isn't.....

Comes in all sorts of materials, colors, types.....boxers to g-strings....loud or subtle...

That being said 15 years ago there we’re great sounding dacs                            Mark Levinson 31 , there were many Multibit ladder chips out there from              Burr Brown , and Analog devices , even Phillips 

Benchmark dacs are terrible sounding, these make dogs go wild with their highly and I mean over the top analytical sound. I also had the Audio Resesrch Dac 1 way back which would sound pretty bad these days. When traveling for work 14 years ago, I had an external battery powered  $750 dac hooked up to my iphone that sounded very good. 
The question should have been, are there any current dacs that sound bad or are not an improvement over what you get in a non-audiophile cd player. I’d still take my dac in my older Sony cd/sacd player over a benchmark dac, and the Sony dac can’t hold a candle to the newer better dacs.