dacs that I have had in my system - a listing

@jjss49 I had a similar type of question about the testing process used. It's helpful to learn about the additional cone driver speakers referenced.  Thanks for sharing that information. Those are some really nice speakers to test with and compare dacs. 

If I may ask, and not that it was necessary nor do I know of your past setups,  by chance were any high efficiency 100db horn type speakers with low watt tube amps used around the time you were testing these dacs?  If so, what kind of differences did you happen to notice with treble energy, mids, or bass for that matter...

I honestly don’t think speaker choice is the most important thing here although using the very transparent Maggies seems to be a very good choice. In these comparisons the most interesting info to me are the relative differences between the DACs rather than the absolute strengths that may shine in one speaker type or another, and I think that this was born out when @jjss49 intermittently introduced other very different speakers and the relative differences still prevailed and were largely speaker agnostic. This is what makes this thread and feedback so powerful — you can reasonably expect the same relative strengths in your system between DACs regardless of your speakers or even your system. Very valuable stuff indeed!

Yep! I think all the questions show interest and great admiration of someone truly having a passion for self-learning and validation in ones own system(s) versus taking anyone’s word for it. Just gotta love it. If you can do it, it’s the only way to go.

The rest of us tag along trying to leverage this information and experience in different ways to learn vicariously through @jjss49, with great appreciation!

@jjss49 Thanks for the clarification. It seems that the Maggies were good for determining differences between the Dacs and also transferable to other speakers.

I did not really understand what sound you were looking for to select a DAC. Many DACs you tried were of the same design.

when i started out in jan 2020, i wanted to see what streaming was about, get it working, see how good it might sound

my existing references were my analog rig and my cd players, which were/are modwright modded sony es and marantz units with dan’s 5687 tube output stage and 5ar4 tube rectifier (quite high sonic standard, in my view)

like many, i went with the bluesound node first with its nice user interface, but the onboard dac sounded lifeless, so i read and watched yt vids re ’good’ dacs under or around a grand, and made a list of candidates - so this was a semi random walk at that point, surveying the field... chord 2qute, mhdt, ayre codex, pontus, rme adi2, lil schiits and so on -- these pretty much all sounded much better than the node dac... but quite noticeably different from each other, with sonic strengths and weaknesses

going through those, i was well on the horse so to speak, curiosity intensified, so started going to more expensive ones, either well reviewed or discussed, and so up the lines for chord, denafrips, metrum, schiit etc etc to understand the progressions as well as some other ’hot’ dacs (audio mirror, musical paradise....)

by 2022 i had heard some very expensive ones and several purported giant killers (by and large NOT, for those with well assembled, resolving systems) and i was getting a good appreciation of what going to $3-4-5-6 grand units got you sonically, buildwise, feature wise

i learned that in the modern dac world, there are clearly two sonic camps (clean crisp clear vs smooth and sweet ... with some in middle ground), somewhat analogous to the age old prototypical ’solid state vs tube’ sensibilities, but interestingly, each camp could handle imaging, prat, transient resolution and micro detail quite differently (for example an mhdt orchid with a better tube in it was much better than a border patrol at micro detail and transient resolution, even though both are in the ’smooth/sweet’ camp)

by middle of last year, i had settled on my top tier, the weiss, chord stack and msb analog as keepers, and beyond that, i have just continued playing with/trying less costly newcomers that are highly touted (gustard r26, denafrips revisions, musetec, eversolo and so on) as ’high value/giant killer’ units, just to hear for myself how good they are, and how close to my top tier they come

If I may ask, and not that it was necessary nor do I know of your past setups, by chance were any high efficiency 100db horn type speakers with low watt tube amps used around the time you were testing these dacs?

@decooney i did not... long long story with my efforts over the decades trying to find a high efficiency speaker i can truly live with long term ...but despite my efforts, i continue to strike out after so so many at bats... just too much transducer distortion for my ears in some form, in each case

but hope springs eternal, i still keep my pair of wavelength cardinals and a cary 300b sei around, in case lightning strikes!! 😆🤣