Neutral Dac?

@schw06

From my personal experience, if you listen to DACs with excellent measurements and find them dry / bright, then there’s something else in your playback chain that’s causing this.

Judging from your past posts on speakers, you seem to gravitate towards a brighter overall sound (Klipsch Cornwall / Forte). If you want to pursue neutrality with your electronics, you probably have to consider changing out your speakers.

you should try the Wyred4 sound 10th anniversary DAC, the reviews on it have been stellar one of the reviewers put it up against his VPI turntable with the $5,000 cartridge and he said that the 10th anniversary was every bit as analog sounding not cheap $4,500 US, and they offer a 30-day trial period if you don't like it you send it back and get your money back I tried it and I totally agree most analog sounding DAC that I've had in my system I absolutely love it.

I sent back 2 Topping DAC's....reliability issues.....Go with the Denafrips VENUS II at 3 K or the Audio Mirror Toubadour $ 3.5 K.....anything more expensive is a waste of money unless you have a 50K system.

The neutral thing is hard… it is so associated with flat measured it gets the rap of meaning lean. 
 

So, for example, I owned a Audio Research Reference CD9 / DAC. If I characterize it’s sound, I would say it is detailed, warm and natural sounding. The reality is, tonally it makes music that sounds exactly like what I hear in the wild (real acoustic instruments as in the symphony and jazz venues). But I would not refer to it as neutral as I think people would think analytical.

I had a Berkeley Alpha Reference 3 DAC ($22K) to which I compared my ARC DAC. The difference was absolutely minuscule… but the ARC, was ever so slightly warmer and more natural. So both should be called neutral… but, I wouldn’t dare as once again conjure the feeling I would be calling them lean. 
 

also I helped choose a DAC for a friend and we got him a Yggdrasil. The generality is that it sound quality is competitive with DACs of roughly twice the cost… which puts it in the $5K competitive range. I also ended up buying a Gungnir for my office system. Hate the name (Schiit) but in the budget category they are really good values.

While I haven’t listened to every DAC ever made, every DAC I’ve heard has flavored the sound. Having say that, having not been in the studio with the mixing engineer, I have little idea what most music is supposed to  sound like.