Thinking about getting a R2R DAC

Also fact that noise / distortion can be pleasing to some and it has been shown, again fact that playing with noise and distortion can give a sense of space that is not in the recording.

All signals that comes from a musician recorded in a studio to the ears of an audiophile(even a deaf one) sitting in his room, are a complex chain of transformations and an imperfect recreation of the original lived event....( and the recording room,the speakers , the microphone,the recording instruments, the electrical grid of our house,the mechanical embedding of our audio system, the acoustical complex setting of the room etc play an enormous role and all this is not reducible to high frequencies rendering by some dac, NOS one or not)

Speaking of the" pure reproduction" of this event without any qualitative transformations and with an alleged and desirable perfect quantitative reproduction is a metaphor that point to an "idealized" situation that can never be realized completely anyway...

Thanks for recognizing the fact that what you called distortion can be pleasing for some...." playing with noise and distortion" is fundamental and the complex trade-off management inherently linked to engineering art....Accuracy is important for correctly using equations in electronic engineering but i hope that all old engineers with experience use their limited ears accuracy also and i hope that they do not always equate pleasing with accurate in the mathematical sense.....Anyway,i know that they do, they are not all dogmatical "religious" zealot character.... :)





My best regards ....

I will add that the concept of "timbre" in acoustic can never in no way be reducible to high frequencies rendering....

Then what is important is the accuracy of the timbre instrument rendering, not only the high frequencies linked to it....Timbre ask for more than 5 complex concepts to be defined and it is not even a total consensus in science about the relation between all these necessary concepts ordering because it is a complex phenomenon.....

The fact that some NOS dac can give a good representation of timbre is a common experience....The fact that some non NOS dac can give also a good representation of timbre is another fact.... This representation/reproduction of the timbre instrument or  voices in a natural way is linked not only to the dac but MOSTLY to a great number of different other factors, some i called embeddings controls, and there are many others also....


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« A fact is NEVER only a fact, except for simple mind »- Anonymus

When you pass the very significant ultrasonic content of a typical unfiltered or lightly filtered NOS DAC through a non linear system which all audio systems are especially at ultrasonic frequencies and with tubes, that aliases into the audible band.

Again, misuse of the word 'aliases' - the correct term would be 'intermodulates'.

So I now do wonder, WHAT'S the bottom line of all this techno squabble?
Is there a bottom-line? At all. 
CAN an R-2R DAC sound better than any NON-R2R one, due to its DAC construction - if the analogue output stages are equally well implemented?
I'm sure this was the intended enquiry of the OP, no?
This also given, that initial analogue/digital and microphone recording limitations are discounted for. 
M. 🇿🇦 

There is no reason for an R2R to sound better or worse than a non R2R. It's all implementation including the up front signal processing. There is a reason why you may like or dislike a NOS DAC though and it is not because it is more accurate.