no2headphones,
My curiosity about DACs was actually limited to chips. I first tried just DAC and it brought me to much more but most were regarding DACs as a stand-alone machines or other, basically finished, products.
I have no idea how chips work and consider those who can design them very bright and admire their work. I found out that most threads that somehow talk about DAC chips have 10-20-30 posts. Maybe more, I really did not dig too deep, but far less than threads about cables. Not much discussion about comparison and other details and properties of DAC chips.
So I thought, on one side we have an item that is advanced in execution and that cannot be replaced by just about anything. Not many talk about it on Audiogon (some other websites are more active in that regard, though). On the other side we have an item that can, relatively functionally, be replaced by pretty much anything that conducts electricity and there are a few threads regarding it right now and they have hundreds of posts each. We get all technical and scientific about much simpler item barely mentioning the sophisticated one that does heavy work. I have a feeling that nobody who can figure out the way to improve DAC chips ever visits these threads. Who knows, they may be too busy improving a little piece which will enable us to differentiate between burned-in and not-burned-in cable in the future.
This would be kind of thread I was looking for to compare with cable threads. See how many and when. Yet, you will see threads about tweaks consisting of howling at the moon or bringing African plants into the room going much stronger.
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/grounding-dac-chip-tweak?highlight=dac%2Bchip
