dacs that I have had in my system - a listing

That's impressive!  What's the best bang for the buck IYHO?

@jjss49  - 

"almost all dacs below have been owned, and spent extensive time (at least 2-3 months) in my system"

@mahler123 

"How many hours do you actually listen to each DAC, with that kind of turnover?"

Curious as to your answer to mahler123 given it is hard on the surface to see how many critical listening hours were  given to each with these many DACs going through your system - 2020- 9; 2021 - 19; 2022 -15 ; 2023 -6. 

I can't imagine your list of cables  They probably make more differences than the dacs.

Did you have something close to a control reference system you used to evaluate most of these or did you change speakers and amps too in parallel at times?

Have you had a standard streamer to test them with or have your tried a bunch of those also?

i will chip away at the questions my list has engendered

yes most of the time it was solid state amplification into magnepans (1.7i and 3.7i)

in the earlier period 2020/ early 21 was big harbeths or spendors with solid state (hegel, pass, musical fidelity)

i was never a computer streamer, so when i launched into this, i started with a bank of 3 bluesound node 2i’s (multiple can be sync’d through the app), then went to node 3 usb x3, then in 2021, i caved to roon, and subsequently migrated to a bank of ifi zenstreams (with lps), and then also to paralleled sets of sonore optical rendus with ether regens for lan cleansing when feeding unitized streamer/dacs

i tried other streamers against the zenstreams and o-rendu’s intermittently (lumin, auralic, innuos, pro-ject, volumio and so on)

Why do you try so many DAC’s from the same company? E.g. there are many MHDT, Schiit, Metrum, Denafrips DACs there -- why? Do they really vary so much?

when i heard a nice sounding one, i was curious to see how that company handled their model progression... i.e., when you spent more what did you get sonically? ...i was determined to hear this for myself (my overall guiding analogy is as with analog gear, you are really hearing the cartridge/arm/table mostly... so understanding performance gained up a maker’s model progression is key to finding the sweet spots in the curve ... dynavector karat to 20x2 to xx2 to tkr, and so on)

as you would imagine dave, what you get as you move up the line is different with different companies - with denafrips you get progressively more treble detail and ’openness’, with metrum you get more silky smoothness and richness, as two examples

mhdt is the exception, those dacs are not in a vertically stacked food chain, they simply use different r2r dac chips from back in the day, so my curiosity was to hear an orchid running a philips tdai1541 vs a stockholm using a burr brown pcm61k, with all else in the dac design being held constant