The sound quality from DACs - is it all the same?

That statement says it all your expert is none of the above .

hav8ng owned a Audio store ,parts quality and design are essential to good sound as well as quality digital cables which I just was part of extensive testing in our audio club ,and yes even a quality digital cable makes a audible difference .

on average 25% of the price of the product goes into the build including packaging meaning your $400 dac is msybe $80 in parts = Youwill hear a pocket radio 

worth of digital , there are great buys like the $900 Denafrips Aries-2  which is = to a quality $1500 dac , but I feel $2k on up is needed minimum. to get true Audiophile quality digital $$5-6kk  is the sweet spot  after discounts .it’s just my extensive observation , I spend $1k ,and $1500 on digital cables which make a dramatic improvement in the sound of any dac , One of my favorites

Very unique cables from Serbia Final Touch Audio , Lampizator uses these exclusively on their dacs. Very natural -Un digital their Callisto usb is class leading ,the best under $1k usb cable I have heard to date , the top Sinope usb cable I recently bought ,as well as Ethernet cables streaming now sounds so much more detailed and natural ,I just had to point this out.

I am afraid Audio Science Review is a completely useless site for any useful information on actual sound quality. Having been an audiophile and a scientist over the last fifty years. Amir or what ever his name is… is a guy obsessesed with measurements and is completely clueless about musical reproduction of sound. I can appreciate his interest in measurement… but the relationship to sound quality is virtually non-existent.

I have owned DACs costing in the hundreds of dollars, $2K, $5K, $10K, $17K and $22K. I assure you theyor sound is far more correlated to price than his measurements. This is because companies that produce good DACs start by using parameters…. Then they listen to then, to make them sound good.

Stuff that measures flat tends to sound terrible. Audio Science Review is really good at producing pretty charts. After put together a fantastic sounding system… go back and see what his charts look like for your equipment… oh, that is right, you will not find any… it’s all budget stuff.

ASR is a joke. Measurements are the start of evaluation not the only thing. His frequency response measurements are just stupid.  A 100hz in a sweep is just one tone. Does one instrument at 100hz sound the same as another?  So how can you say the sweep represent what real music will sound like. 
 

the only noise insee is that coming from ASR site. 

He says fancy audio gear is a waste of money because the data is already bit-perfect. 

That's a tired old ill-informed argument.

In any case, a DAC is a Digital Analog Converter and bit perfect has nothing to do with analog.

 

He could be your dumbest relative. Do you have any kin that live outside your own imagination?