one doesn’t need golden ears to hear that different dacs present the music differently, just properly working ones... 😂.... but folks will believe what they want to believe and some can find reason to not trust their own ears
that been said, for most in this pursuit, a modern dac makes much more sense, given the compatibility to all sorts of input formats (most specifically usb fed from computers serving as the streamer) and bit rates and resolutions of various audio files folks may use or buy in the present day
that doesn’t mean that older dacs are poor sounding, quite the contrary ... that is a different question -- as with anything in this hobby, one just needs to know what any item does, does well and does not do...
notions of power supply isolation and jitter management are not recent discoveries, recently addressed through recent technology -- for example, even peter madnick’s very affordable audio alchemy gear from the 1990’s was properly addressing jitter, clean power in digital and proper transmission of digital datastreams
that been said, for most in this pursuit, a modern dac makes much more sense, given the compatibility to all sorts of input formats (most specifically usb fed from computers serving as the streamer) and bit rates and resolutions of various audio files folks may use or buy in the present day
that doesn’t mean that older dacs are poor sounding, quite the contrary ... that is a different question -- as with anything in this hobby, one just needs to know what any item does, does well and does not do...
notions of power supply isolation and jitter management are not recent discoveries, recently addressed through recent technology -- for example, even peter madnick’s very affordable audio alchemy gear from the 1990’s was properly addressing jitter, clean power in digital and proper transmission of digital datastreams