What makes a DAC so expensive?

@mahgister and @duglas and others, I appreciate the thrust of your comments, and there is one significant piece that is left out of much of this discussion, which may be the largest determiner of the music experience:

The quality of the listening. 

You may have perfect ears and still lack the stability of attention to receive the full musical message. This is not a small thing.

Why are we not discussing our listening habits - the one component we all have some control over, which can be improved with ongoing reflection...

My preference would be to share some discussion about how people listen and how they have worked with their listening over the years. My sense is that people don't notice how they listen, and often follow habitual patterns when listening.

One interesting, and I think "audiophile" flavored example, comes from a post I read some months ago, where the person described how difficult it was to listen to his system for more than a few minutes, because he would become absorbed in criticism of his system. 

That may sound familiar, or it may not, but what is missing is the fact that everyone is facing "habits" in their listening that impact the experience greatly, probably much more than any particular component. If I sit down and my mind is restless the entire time, for example, it may be nearly impossible to enjoy anything coming my way.

This shifts the focus ever more away from products and consumption to the person. Many people are chasing the wrong thing, not noticing how poorly or inconsistently they listen. And by the way, you may be able to detect differences at minute levels between various components and still fail to sit and relax enough to truly enjoy the music.

So, the listening piece gets more personal, more internal, more real than the next DAC. 

Any thoughts?

@jjss49 How do you listen? What are you habits of listening, and are they significant to the value of your music listening experiences?

There is a concept in economics that says "price rations the supply."  This is usually  brought up in a discussion about crude oil or soybeans.  However, the principle will travel.  If you manufacture 100 DACs a month and can only sell 35 of them your probably priced to high.  But if 99 of them find a new home each month, your right where you should be.  

When the S.Q. of my system was very bad, i listened to my favorite best music: Bach.... It was possible to concentrate then on music not troubled by the bad sound...

When the S.Q. goes from bad to acceptable, i go on with all style and different kind of music.... The recording was not my primary concern because sound quality begins to be acceptable....

The listening habits has 2 parts linked together: concentration on musical composition, or concentration on sound quality....

The concentration on sound quality must relax with time and with a good embed audio system...Concentration on music is the goal....

Listening musical composition shift the attention and the awareness to music not sound ....Sound being no more a restraint or an impediment, music only must grab you but by way of the sound quality it is easier...

For the last years my attention focus was dedicated more than half the time to sound...

I was in the obligation to create my own audio system, it begins with directing the awareness and attention to sound...

The best way to develop sound awareness is to set the stage for listening experiments: what if i change something on the wall?
What if i put a piece of quartz on the electrical panel? What if i change the speakers and put something under it to attenuate vibrations?

Small step by small step you will develop a greater attention capacity for details perception and this new listening awareness will guide you toward the implementation of better conditions for your audio system.... You will discover that it is not mainly the electronic design of amplifier. or of dac, or even of the speakers that create the S.Q. but on par with it and perhaps even more than the electronic design only, it was what i called the mechanical embeddings(controls of vibrations /resonance), the electrical embedding of your house(the general noise floor of the house where is embedded the noise floor of your audio system) and the acoustical settings of your room...

Then you will quit the blind urge to improve your system by buying costly new promising parts... You will trust more your ears in an incremental process of listening experiences linked to some simple experiments about vibrations, noise controls and acoustic....You will read reviewers for what they are : sellers not mainly technical adviser about how to create audiophile experience....

More you will develop a trust in your ears more confidence you will have and you will learn to know the truth about audio by listening not reading about consumers products...

I have ZERO hand craft hability, and i am not a master of D.I.Y. at all but at some time if you want badly something without the necessary money you must be creative.... My way was listening and experimenting very simple thing indeed...

After 2 intense years i begin to be conscious of the 3 dimensions of the audio system way of embeddings.... Nowhere any article advise seriously people about that.... They speaks most of the times about costly products supposed to be a cure for ONE only of the embeddings....But no single product by itself can resolve the acoustical embeddings and the electrical embeddings.... Perhaps one product like the springs can help for vibrations, but even in this embeddings only one product or device cannot optimally do the job for all pieces of gear....

It is here that learned listenings experiments helped me toward my own original solution, especially with the acoustic embedding...

It is more fun to learn to listen between experiments than buying illusions ....

It takes only time.....




In a word:

Try to create the material varying conditions that will gives to you the necessary feed backs variation controls that will transform your passive hearing capacity into an active listening organ....

The room is the ear and the ears are the room, you then must learn to work with the 2 at the same time....





last word:
Some people argue that the sound memory is very short lived then illusory....It is not totally true...I dont record sound memory by itself in my body, what is recorded is the pleasure/displeasure associated with certain sounds impression, the emotion is enduring not the sound memory by itself....I remember then not the sound directly, but my body remember his reaction to the sound and recreate the emotion like a response/habit, this is these emotional responses that are encoded in my body and that will serve me like some steps in a feed back loop of learnings experiments....

Then learning to listen is learning also to retrieve in you some past emotion and recreate it....You then became active participant in your own  hearing transformative process, not only a passive ear that recorded external facts....

There is no more pure external  facts only (sounds);  there is music, where any sound is a unique emotional conscious experience....