Downside to R2R Ladder DACs?

@cheeg the section labeled "Oven Control" in the Lavry DA924 user manual may be informative. The DA924 (DA2002 for consumers) was often considered a "gold" standard in professional audio DACs and not just for its color.

The specific sentence relevant to your question is:

The PCM DAC is constructed of custom made laser trimmed thin film resistor networks; yet any resistor is subject to short term drift due to temperature variations and long term drift due to component aging.

bs meter from that salesman just hit 100

suggest u trust him less going forward

Just to chime in on salesmen BS... I recently had this salesman suggest I’d buy his Audiolabs MDac because the other DAC I wanted to try out somewhere else was sounding worthless. The DAC I was talking about was the RME-ADI 2 DAC...

DAC designers have more than a passing knowledge about resistor load stability and incorporate end of life tolerances in their designs when choosing the initial or purchased tolerance. In other words, they listen and evaluate before they put it on the market.

Since we are an audio manufacturer that builds DHT R2R dacs, this is absolutely false.  That would mean every component would have the same issues since everything has resistors in them.

Dump that sales person.

There is no superiority in r2r dacs, they tend to be more euphonic but sometimes less resolving. YMMV

That all depends on the design of the DAC.