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

@big_greg + 1

Just my 2 cents:

Worked with several internationals from India (all very intelligent and well educated) some had family come over from India for a tour of USA and spent a few days at our work site. Joquime introduced his family visitors by name and called them his cousin brothers and cousin sister. When I asked what he meant, he explained that they were in fact his cousins (his father’s brother’s children) but in their culture consider all family other than parents and grand parents, as a brother or a sister - thus their term "Cousin Brother or Cousin Sister, etc.

Before we insult people and expose our own lack of intellect, we might consider that not everyone on this planet shares our same culture or manor of expression.

As far as specs - I use them to get a basic comparison, but still it comes down to good sound (they don’t all sound the same) and a history of reliability and performance........Jim

Agree with most of Hansen's post. However point 4 is not correct:

") The DAC chip - almost everything these days is delta sigma with a built-in digital filter. Differences between different chips is one of the less important aspects of D/A converter designs. Both ESS and AKM have some special tricks to reduce out-of-band noise, which can be helpful, but not dramatic.".

Firstly, there are still many R2R Dacs that are manufactured. Secondly a number of high end manufacturers do not rely on off the counter chips but make their own. Thirdly manufacturers using ESS chips tweak the chip so that it sounds differently. Personally I do not really like Ess chips, preferring AKM or Burr Brown. Ess to me often, but not always, sounds shrill in the mid range and is hard to listen to after a while. This is what the minion leader on another site in particular, finds difficult to understand.

@jackhifiguy You do you.  If the ASR crowd makes you happy, hang there.

As I was curious I did quite a bit of research and reading over the past few days. There is some very interesting information to be found that really shows that particular site and its minion leader should be ignored.