Most Extensive State-of-the-Art DAC Survey Ever!

No Esoteric included either.

Re the DCS, the Apex upgrade significantly mitigates the tendency to sterility in the DCS sound so he would have hated the pre-Apex Vivalid!

WBF thread on this offers far more context. Note the highly differential setups.

Ron Resnik, co-owner of WBF (whose video is the one posted in the opening post), goes into much more detail... including his personal preferences.

DAC Audition Impressions What’s Best Forum Thread

Davidten I believe MikeLavigne is also one of the founder of WBF , I might be wrong.

None of those DACs on that list interest me. The only one I would even consider would be the T+A one at their crazy price. They seem to at least have some technical chops behind the research they do and thus maybe able justify the price in my eyes.

SD 3100 HV Reference Streaming DAC (ta-hifi.de)

Unless you’ve got FU $$$ and are ok with throwing it out the window, spending $30k+ on a DAC that could be matched or surpassed in performance in 5 years by a $2000 DAC is insane to me.  Assuming that timeframe you would’ve spent $6000+ per year to own one of these DACS and then it’s a highly-depreciated audio boat anchor.  No thanks.  A more mature technology like turntables, yeah I can get more behind that, but in this rapidly evolving era of DAC/electronics technological innovations — no thanks.