Which DACs are known to be sweet/rich/relaxed?

OP,

”When a system is highly resolving, it will expose recordings that are bright and harsh. It’s actually a good thing.”

Well, it depends. Highly resolving can mean highlighted details… with it typically come a harshness and noise. The noise is not the kind you hear directly it just is pressure on your ears (higher noise floor). But the accentuated details cover the details in the bass and is frequently accompanied by a loss of rhythm and pace… the musicality / emotional connection.

I struggled with this for years until I was able to walk the very tight line of keeping the details (but not unrealistically emphasized) and midrange bloom and musicality. Over time one after another of my components became tubed. Now my system is really emotionally compelling, has no hint of sharpness, and has all the details with the correct emphasis. All albums generally sound there best.

In my opinion your comment highlights a problem that needs to be solved not a necessary consequence.

— My room is large and not heavily treated. Playing music loud will overload the room: at 80dB the reflections make up, say, only 15% of what reaches my ear. At 90dB that could be 30 or 40% (numbers here are for the sake of example).

@robert1976 I always like a good problem. When I first read this, my first thought was "sound does not work that way". It is a saying with audiophiles, but unless your walls are falling down, you are not going to physically overload a room. I am not an acoustic engineer, but I am a physicist, so I get the basics.

Then I remembered loudness contours. Cymbals have a lot of energy at high frequency, 3 - 10KHz. Look at the chart below. At 80db (1KHz), 10KHz has to be 10db louder to sound as loud. At 100, it only needs to be 4-5 db louder to sound the same. I have to expect that is what you are experiencing.

I had this link from when I was looking at acoustics before hiring someone. A lot of materials like glass, some wood floors, drywall (plasterboard) reflect more at high frequencies.

It sounds like volume and your room are combining to make you unhappy. I don't have a solution, but the high quality equalizer that can be switched in and out may be best. Perhaps it is not the room that is overloading, it is your ears at higher frequencies? Any experts on hearing out there?  I know when I am at concerts, if the room is reflective it is grating.

A very rare chance to commit to an objective test in a subjective reality:

Everything you have here has the electrical signal (we call it ’electrical’, which is a huge misnomer, it’s obscenely pidgin and incomplete), and all of it has to deal with the problems of how a signal in a delta state has to work with the ’wire’. Which is inordinate complex when we look at the quantum aspects of electron transfer.

Everyone is looking for the better, cleaner, more detailed and sweeter and I can assure you that a lot of that ’final frontier’ of elusiveness is contained in the errors encountered when trying to use wire for electrical signal transfer.

Liquid metal cables were created to get rid of the majority of the major problems in using wire for high end audio attempts. To get rid of the inherent problems in using wire for signal transfer.

It is the only place in the world, the only way in the world.. to sidestep this wire problem while still remaining in the electrical realm. To try them out is to be a fish in the water, who finally, for the first time it it’s life, understands what water is. To finally form a perspective that shows and illustrates what water --- is.

This is due to the electrical signal being handled totally different than it is with wire. I’d love to lay it out in fine detail, but we get haters if we explain.. and we get haters if we don’t. Ignorance screams it’s presence, if we have the sense of mind to understand what such noise is actually about.

Since the information is obvious at the high end and cutting edge physics level, and not quite known at all... at the high and audio level... and not well understood in the high technology level, we explain nothing. Nothing at all.

The information and the lore and the look down the road ---is far too valuable for that.

So, if you run into the ’noise over signal’ problem that all high and audio attempts eventually run into, you’ll find yourself in front of true fundamentals, and a huge fundamental, not well recognized, is that conductive elements (periodic table) are a good item to use in electrical signal transfer, but upon deeper reflection and deeper looks, problems arise. Limitations arise.

Problems that are inherent in the medium of the device itself (wire made of elements and alloys), and only some other tactic or method or medium that commits to a different transfer method will get this issue objectively clarified and separated out.

The liquid metal audio cables provide that avenue for the first time ever and probably the only time ever.

When the OP gets to the area that they are in .. they are really engaging in hard limits, true ceilings, and getting further down the road involves questioning all fundamentals, in total re-assessment.

(FYI the basic Liquid metal cables were tested at the highest levels of the TI (Texas Instruments) technical campus, and found to be notably anomalous in expected electrical norms. This, from their top man, who has an IQ of 196)

Some may call this an unwarranted advertisement, but no, I’d call it a wake up call.

We are a very small company who does not sell a lot of product. but.. we were told quite clearly (by a major cable manufacturer), in 2009, that we scare the hell out of all the top cable manufacturers. Too bad that never came to fruition. I guess they all gave their customers too much credit and they attacked too hard, for us to become the technical and quality threat that we really are. They were seriously worried that we’d take a good chunk of their sales away from them. All of them were worried (as we were told), as we are the holders of ’the next level’ of audio cables. (*)

It’s my personal fault, really. I wanted audio to be better, so I went after questioning the fundamentals, the real fundamentals. So we changed the full on physics fundamentals in use, in electron transfer, in high end audio.

It only changes a few percentage points of articulation of fine detail but we’ve all got the other 98% and this changes the 2% you want changed, which was previously out of reach and not known in it’s character or nature, as the fish could not and cannot realize or know of the water it is in....

Which makes it a really big deal when the chase, the attempt... is aiming at the impossibility of perfection.

(*) why are we not as successful as we might be? well, it’s simple. we’re the first, the orignal and the only. And acceptance, and understanding, takes time. and there has to be more than one provider, there has to be multiples in the market, for a thing to go forward. there must be market presence. THEN it can take off. So, even if we are the best in the field, where all the orignal innovations and incremental advances in the technology involved -are created whole cloth by us...there is, in the market record...scant chance that we’d ever succeed. When the patents expire and more players get involved, it might have a chance. But none will likely approach or make it to our lore and application level, as the original thinking involved in the core innovation speaks of deeper knowledge than that of the dilettante.

Cutting edge is cutting edge and in that definition and reality, very few people make it there. Eg, how many climb Everest, even though billions know it’s name and image, and billions have an opinion?

Who you gonna trust, the noise or the signal?

Everything you have here has the electrical signal (we call it ’electrical’, which is a huge misnomer, it’s obscenely pidgin and incomplete), and all of it has to deal with the problems of how a signal in a delta state has to work with the ’wire’. Which is inordinate complex when we look at the quantum aspects of electron transfer.

(FYI the basic Liquid metal cables were tested at the highest levels of the TI (Texas Instruments) technical campus, and found to be notably anomalous in expected electrical norms. This, from their top man, who has an IQ of 196)

Oh please, do share with us his name? I would not hesitate to call him. I have enough cred in semiconductor device physics and processing to cold call most people without shame.

Most of the time I don’t like to credential drop. This is not one of them. I have a PhD in solid state physics (which is not the same as solid state devices). I have worked in the semiconductor industry on device physics and materials processing, and now in batteries.

I am going to go out on a limb and guess you have absolutely no published results, no publishable tests, no 3rd party testing of any sort that you can share that verifies your claims of superiority in the conduction of signals for audio purposes. I would actually be pleasantly surprised if you proved me wrong, but I don’t have high expectations.

I am not a hater. I am a highly qualified skeptic. There is nothing you have stated that eludes being validated through any number of measurements. To that conclusive end, I expect you to be able to supply those measurements. That is not too much to ask, nor is there any proprietary reason that a measurement cannot be shared. I am not asking for construction or material details.

Have you read and understood the patent?

Do you understand what it implies, and is not being used in the world of audio?

There is enough information in the post that if you are determined you can find that person mentioned.

BTW, it comes across as a hater, no matter how much you use it try to hide behind being a ’skeptic’. Your demeanor is deeply offensive to all around (on the subjective side, anyway. Maybe you make some others happy. Who knows). You make situations worse, not better. More antagonistic, not less. And this is not the place for that. In person, you skepticism may be no problem at all. But this is the written word, which is an entirely different format and human relational avenue.

Grow some humanity and humility and use it in the face of (your own) personal perceptions of adversity on this forum. Be a human. Wind it down, not up.

If we were in person, I might relate more to you. Depends on what you look like, to me, in person. My experience in that sort of thing is the people go out and aggrandize themselve off of what I explain to them, and grab the brass ring in their field or invention or whatnot. I'm really tired of that, so if you want more, figure it out yourself.