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

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.

my NAD D1050 still sounds awesome

I have the D3020, and it's a pretty sweet and small integrated! I used to use it on my desktop. Certainly better than DAC's and Class D from 20 years ago.

With my Overdrive SX DAC, I can barely tell the difference between 44.1 and 192 tracks.  Sounds better with PCM than players doing DSD/SACD.

The key is eliminating the brick-wall filter for 44.1.  Digital filtering is the #2 problem with digital.  Jitter being #1.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio