High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.

@erik_squires 

I had a very weird experience last weekend. My friend has a DIY dac. In it was a NOS TDA1543 Philips chip hooked on a  a Rasberry pi with i2s. It could only play 16/44. The power supply was a very cheap phone charger with an extra usb cable in the charger (2nd power supply). I looked at the psu and my thoughts were. "are we going to listen to music through this?"  

When the music started playing i fell off the couch in disbelieve. The music was so pure, tangible. It was audiophile heaven......  He paid €300,- for this setup. It sounded like a million bucks.  

I'm seriously thinking to sell my own dac after hearing his. 


My own stuff is no slouch either. and i buy new cd's constantly! 

@erik_squires 

thanks for the radio tip. I will check it out!

So what are the best r2r dacs tknget for a good price . I’m currently using a marantz sa14 s1 for sacd/cd playback that uses a burr brown dsd1792a chip . Is this r2r or sigma delta?

Wherever people talk about DACs, certain themes reliably emerge:
-- that R2R, specifically NOS, sounds better, more natural than D/S
-- D/S DACs sound way more accurate than multibit & NOS DACs, and image way better
-- that certain DACs or DAC mfrs totally suck based solely on their measurements (irrespective of multibit vs D/S)

I agree with the first (wholeheartedly), but not the 3rd (and really don't much care about the 2nd). The limitation of any "measurements are all that matters" approach is that it disregards all subtle sonic differences from components--pretending that such differences don't exist or don't matter.

I own 2 DACs from Audio GD, the brand one post above disparaged. One is multibit (DAC-19) and the other is NOS multibit (NOS 19). Both are better than any delta-sigma DAC I ever heard or owned. The NOS 19 is my day-to-day DAC (in primary desktop system w/studio monitors + sub as well as headphones); and the DAC-19 is in my secondary, headphone-only system.

I started listening to digital in the mid-1980s (on a big, high-resolution 2-channel system) and pretty much hated it. Things slowly got better, but only w/the arrival of multibit have I succeeded in forgetting the whole digital vs analog conundrum and just enjoy the music.

Both my monitors (ATC SCM12 Pro) and various headphones & amps are highly resolving, so I am basing this opinion on sonic experience, not simple prejudice.

Media sample rate takes a backseat to recording quality no doubt.

However I am now a convert to upsampling and there is no going back.  I upsample all files to DSD 512 and play back through the T+A DAC8 DSD’s single bit chipless DSD converter.

While there are many “sounds the same” DACs around $2k that are very good, the T+A Dac is more than a couple notches above these.  How much of that is due to the upsampling and more powerful filtering, I don’t know.

I can’t help but think this method is going to gain more and more traction as CPU cycles get cheaper because it’s another significant step up.