Are DAC's overpriced?

If all your playing is Red Book CD's than look at some of the top of the line DAC's from the early 90's. They used R2R chips. Today a lot of the super expensive DAC's are going back to R2R topology but they have to do it the hard way because there are no more R2R chips made. Instead of precision laser trimmed resistor banks (Inside of the DAC Chip) now they have to use carefully matched SMD resistors and solder them to a circuit board.
Even one of the owners of Schitt lamented that these chips are no longer available and claims that the Burr Brown PCM63P DAC chip was the best ever made.Why? Because they sound so dam good!I have a Parasound D/AC1000 that uses the BB PMC63P chips, it has three analog PS, one for the digital section and two for the analog audio section. It sounds very musical and they can be purchased cheap. New in 1990 they cost 1000.00, not exactly chump change. 100.00 to 200.00 is what they sell for on Ebay.
So today the high end DAC's are moving back to the older technology to get better sound. The DS style DAC's just don't compete.

BillWojo

+1 Elizabeth 

There are some good sounding low cost DACs and some not so good expensive ones. But the best ones seem to be fairly expensive. As with most stuff. 

R2Rs are back on the market from Analog Devices. Schiit is using them in almost all their DACs as an upgrade.
Now, i'll debate that they are hands down better. I had a new schiit BiFrost MultiBit (R2), a MSB Gold Full Nelson, and a Theta DSPro Gen 2 - and we listened side by side, back and forth.  Frankly, different but very, very close.  People worry too much about chips and not enough about execution-  everything from digital filtering to power supplies to jitter reduction etc etc