Absolute top tier DAC for standard res Redbook CD

George,
Precisely why I addressed my inquiry to Steve N who by all accounts has been successful manufacturing R2R and DS DACs and is a credentialed source. There are unquestionably other builders capable of using either circuit type in DACs. Since he is a knowledgeable contributor to this thread I was interested in his opinion of multibit/R2R "bit perfect " practical or real  world  audible attributes. .
Charles

Steve N who by all accounts has been successful manufacturing R2R and DS DACs and is a credentialed source

Yes Charles but as I said not discrete R2R. he has to use either DS or the Hybrid.
Or he could purchase "discrete" R2R made boards from Sokeris Audio Engineering but he’ll loose his dsd capability, which means nothing to me, as it was pcm before it became that.


Here as of 2017 (more now) are the companies now doing expensive to produce "discrete" R2R ladder dacs for PCM (Redbook) replay. Schiit uses a R2R chip (not for audio) but for missile guidance as there are none now available for audio use, because DS was so much cheaper to make.

Up to $3k: Border Patrol, Monarchy, Denafrips, Audio-gd, MHDT, Holo, Soeskris, Metrum, Schiit

$5-$15K: Audio Note, MSB, Metrum, Computer Audio Design, Aqua, LessLoss, Totaldac, Lampizator

$15K+: CH Precision, Aries Cerat, Light Harmonic, Audio Note, MSB, Totaldac, Lampizator

**Special mention to MSB, Monarchy and Audio Note, who never gave up R2R. Even after the takeover of delta-sigma.



Cheers George

 I don’t hear this purported advantageous asset with comparisons as stated earlier.

That fine if you can't, but I do with CD's 16/44 or the magic sounding Reference Recordings 24/96 CD's that have HDCD encoded which my Linn CD12 thankfully can do with the PMD200 chip.

The best which I've yet to hear from what I've been told is DXD.
I've heard the defunct DVD-A which was very good, better than the Reference Recordings above it's a pity it didn't take off. 

This is a good read from MSB Technologies, they use R2R Ladder in their top line dacs. (big bucks)

 http://www.msbtechnology.com/faq/why-ladder-dacs/

Cheers George

Perhaps it is the harmonic distortion from an R-2R DAC that listeners like - kind of like tubes - measures poorly but sounds subjectively better...

With two types of resistor perhaps the distortion is more in the even harmonics.

All I can say is that for sure the harmonic distortion is way higher on R-2R than DS DACs due to the non-linearities introduced by the finite accuracy of the ladder resistors.

If true, then even low cost R-2R might sound great because higher cost R-2R will likely have less harmonic distortion...