NOS DAC's without any digital filtering?

Bcgator,
Agree with your post, and it's funny as well.

09-26-15: Robertsong
Bombaywalla, your explanations have been super helpful for me.

thanks for your kind words. Glad i could be of assistance.
yeah I know what you mean about trolling the internet for all this info. And, there is a LOT of bad & incorrect info which would confuse & misguide a layman very quickly.

Is an upsampled 16/44.1 file just as good as as "hi-res" file of the same sample rate when using a NOS DAC? No advantage at using a "hi-res" track at all???
Robertsong

this is a difficult question for me to answer as it is so subjective. You & I could be listening to the same hi rez file on your system as one of us could like it & the other not. What then??

I personally think that redbook done well these days in HDCD, XCRD, XRCD2, SHM-CD, etc are really superb & leave very little to be desired.
Many others dont agree & think that hi-rez is the way to go. Each to their own.

As Zd542 pointed out a 16/44.1 when upsampled to a higher rate does not improve in fidelity. You have what you have at 16/44.1 & you can only degrade if you go to a higher rate & at best keep the fidelity the same as what is was at 16/44.1.
With a hi-rez file, like Zd542 wrote, you start off with a higher number of bits (20 or 24 or 32) & so you have a lot more information encoded in those bits. The sonics of the hi-res file will be different from that of the 16/44.1 file & it's really up to you whether you like it or not.
I would say that you should try it esp. if you have hi rez files on-hand &/or have a subscription to a hi-rez msuic website. Try the same track in 2 different formats & see which you like better.
It's really up to the individual...
Sorry for this non-commital reply - it's so subjective.

love your post Bcgator! :-D

Like Bombaywalla, I'm just glad to be part of the team.

Zd542, your post resonates with something that I've been thinking about as well, about people being unhappy back then and all of a sudden unhappy now. It's always been my personal experience that the biggest differences in sound, and shaping a system, happen at the speakers, and that differences between DACs are more subtle. That's just my experience, YMMV. But I've read the threads on Head-fi, and people talk about Delta-Sigma dacs as if having to suffer through them is like dropping your pants, covering your backside with honey, and sitting naked on an ant hill. It goes beyond personal preferences, it's a borderline lynching campaign against almost everything Delta-Sigma. It's been years since I listened to a Theta Dac, and I've not listened to an Yggdrasil, or Red Wine Audio Bellina (just for example), so it's possible I'm missing the boat on new-retro Dac technology, but I just don't hear the misery and torture that so many describe when I myself listen to D-S dacs. So on the one hand, I'm curious about the Yggdrasil, but on the other the levels of hyperbole and vitriol against D-S leave me with an uneasy skepticism. Sorta like when a movie studio blatantly over-promotes a comedy film - you can't help but wonder if you should save the $10 and stay home (which isn't to say that I think Schiit is over-promoting - I think all of the over-promoting is coming from unaffiliated parties).

There is a difference between upsampling and oversampling, When ratio is
even then it is oversampling, usually achieved by usage of PLL. It reduces
jitter - that translates to noise in frequency domain. Stronger reduction of
jitter can be achieved by up sampling in asynchronous rate converter. It can
be done in the DAC or in the re-clocker. Ratios are not even anymore and
often not published. My Benchmark DAC1 upsamples to equivalent of
about 1 million times, but outputs data only at 110kHz where D/A chip THD
are lower than THD at 192kHz. Sound free of noise is often called sterile,
clinical etc. My first impression of DAC1 was that some instruments have to
be missing - it sounded too clean. It was also purposely designed not to
sound warm. It can sound bad in some systems (sounded bright with
previous speakers) but it sounds wonderful with warm sounding speakers.
Any form of filtering automatically increases resolution. It is interesting that
opponents of oversampling and Delta-Sigma DACs like the sound of SACD
that uses exactly the same principal. There are great DACs in each
category, as Bombawalla said, not to mention that it is very personal. Clean
sound can be sterile, while adding a little bit of noise makes sound more
vivid.