MSB uses discrete r2r chips, much like Metrum, Rockna, Holo Audio and some other recent manufacturers. Manufacturing refinements since MSB’s older dacs like the Analog have enabled designers to implement resistors with lower tolerances and thermal restrictions, as well due to manufacturing of scale, these discrete chips are cheaper to produce currently (pre-covid). Based on that, discrete chips engineered by Metrum designer Cees Ruijtenberg and Rockna designer Nicolae Jitariu are very low tolerance and high performing. For instance if you read up on how Cees designed the r2r modules in Metrum dacs to split the bitrates and handle the MSB (most significant bits) vs the LSB (least significant bits) you will see that its a very elegant and clever solution to reduce noise. There is an art to it. That’s where the value proposition comes in, did a particular designer use something very clever to achieve a very high quality sound, IMO you can’t ignore this aspect even though Metrum dacs may be "cheaper" than MSB, for example. Same goes for Jeff Zhu, the designer at Holo Audio. It’s precisely the way he designs his r2r May dacs that they measure almost perfectly even though typical r2r dacs do not measure well.
This class of r2r dacs are different than integrated circuits based r2r dacs such Schiit Yggdrasil, these dacs use r2r integrated circuits like by TI, Burr-Brown, Analog Devices etc. Whether discrete modules are better than integrated circuits may be up to your tastes. People may immediately consider discrete components better (there is a typical Audiogon forum love for anything hand wired point to point) but Schiit dacs are widely loved as we know.
And r2r dacs are yet again different from other implementations such as Delta-Sigma or FPGA dacs. D-S dacs use off the shelf chips by Sabre or Audio Technica or Asahi Kasei Semiconductors for the actual conversion. DCS, Audiobyte etc fall into the FPGA category.
Then there’s the whole challenge of non oversampling vs oversampling. Whenever you are sampling a analog waveform, you are creating mirror image multipliers of the musical frequencies. OS dacs oversample the incoming signal to very high frequencies, so the mirror images are at even higher multipliers and are easier to filter out with gently sloped analog filters, as its easier to design gently sloped analog filters than steep sloped analog filters. NOS dacs do not use filtering with the assumption being that at the nyquist sampling rate of at least 44.1 khz, the waveform mirror images are beyond normal human hearing. But many software media players such as J-River or Tidal can perform the oversampling at the software level before sending it to the dac, further ensuring the mirror images are at much higher frequencies. There are other reasons to design OS dacs, but ultimately it all depends on what the designer wants to achieve.
Going back to the topic: " Msb dacs why not alot of postings", the assumption was cost. But I don’t think that’s true. As a lot of people own Dacs like the Chord Dave, Rockna or TotalDac or even Lampizator models that rival MSB in price and there are a lot more discussions and reviews on these products all over the internet.
Also another assumption was by recommending something well reviewed and measured which costs a bit less I was doing a disservice, because I (and few others posting here) can’t apparently afford a MSB (even though my first line was literally that I was considering an MSB dac at one point). That assumption is also, not true.
