Please Educate Me

I think a lot of audiophiles who obsess over DACs are old timers who are used to having to do that with their old vinyl rigs, which are MUCH HARDER to get right.

Most companies have D2A conversion down pretty well. Little for an audiophile to do other than choose a DAC for whatever reason they choose. Most are very good. DAC technology is much more reliable and robust than phono. Not hard to find a good DAC and just enjoy the music unlike phono rigs which require a lot of expertise and time to get set up optimally. I think this is a big reason many audiophiles tend to poo poo digital still.  10 years ago I could see the point.  Not today though.   They blame it on the sound but its really that a phono setup is a much better toy to play with for those so inclined or merely they are old school and used to that being a thing.

OR here that they got phono gear to sell...

Good points and interesting view.

Our DACs are processing digital information the same as our microwaves, yet we judge them very differently. The difference I believe is that music is an aesthetic pursuit - thus the method of delivery comes under more scrutiny.

... thus the SONIC RESULT comes under more scrutiny

@paul6001 - typing a letter on a keyboard is DIGITAL to start. the english language is made of letters which when keyed are digital. Represented by 1s and 0s in the disk's memory. If you talk about handwriting interpretation that is another matter, there is some analysis conversion taking place.

Stick to arts please.

Digital information is discrete, analogue information is essentially continuous. The pressure waves that come to your ears are continuous. How you convert the discrete information into continuous by interpolation is one of the main issues. Draw a set of axes and put some dots on in that form a sloping straight line, or a sine curve if you want. That's your digital information. Exact and the same for everyone. Now draw a continuous line that goes through those points. As long as it goes through those points it matches the digital data. It's how smooth you are between those points that changes the final graph. Did you join each point up with a straight line or did you "wiggle" a little between the points. Any time you  convert from digital which is discrete, to continuous, which is analogue, you have to will in the missing lines between the points. How you chose to interpret those missing pieces will change the "sound" of the output way. Differences in the execution of those algorithms in terms of weighting, speed etc. change the outcome of the waveform. Once the waveform is analogue, and in wires, it is them open to corruption and interference from other sources, etc. etc. etc, Ultimately, somewhere in a system the conversion from discrete MUST occur. It's all about how it occurs.