How easily can you distinguish between different DACs?

Thanks, duckworp, for sharing your testing results.  

I think most audio gear is so good nowadays that the "diminishing returns" thing kicks in real hard sometimes.

Your post reminds me of a time years back where I bought a new pair of speakers (JMR Trente) and wanted to burn them in for a while.  My main rig at the time was all tubed and was in the $20-$30k range back in early 2000's.  And not wanting to waste tube life I decided to pull out an old, 1970s Pioneer integrated for the burn in purpose.

The speaker cables I used was one of the thinner gauge copper wires bought at radioshack.  And this thing was a mess!  All wadded up making it hard to find the ends.  When I finally found them and hooked up the speakers, it looked like a ball of yarn a few cats had a heyday with.

I had a Marantz 63SE CDP.  I put a disc in to let the speakers break in.  And since I was already there, thought I'd read an audio magazine and listen to the music as a background.

But to my astonishment, the music sounded pretty darn good!  A sub $500 rig was holding its own.

For shitz and giggles I put on a few test tracks being confident the rig would not be able to pull out all the nuances from the tracks that my main rig could.  After a few tracks I stopped, disappointed all that extra money bought so little in return.

At that time I told myself it's ok because I like the audio toys and that had I actually done a long term comparison, I would have noticed the differences right away.

But I didn't do the long term comparison just in case!  ;-)

in an A/B test with a switch, anyone can easily spot the difference between DACs.  When listening to them at different times and further removed, this can be more challenging and there are specific things I look for.  Width of the soundstage.  Instrument separation.  Brightness on certain songs.  Sibilance on certain songs that help you identify the differences.  Best thing to do is take detailed notes of what you hear when listening to different units.  It changes how you evaluate gear.  

+1, @verdantaudio on how to evaluate gear. 

IMHO @duckworp comparison between $1500 and $25000 DAC’s is deeply flawed. How does one expect to hear differences between the two DAC’s with a sub $500 streamer. IME, the source (streamer) is just as important as DAC in the signal chain. One wouldn’t install a $12K streamer ahead of $1500 DAC and vice versa. Both of these components are equally important if you truly want to exploit a high resolution DAC or Streamer. It’s a balancing act, once you achieve this balance; you are in for a royal treat. 

No matter what streamer used, assuming it is of good quality,  which can easily happen for just a few hundred dollars these days , absolutely comparing a common dac to an Uber expensive dac is absolutely a valid thing to do.   If you don’t hear a bigger better difference between a super expensive dac and a more common one there is no reason to buy the way more expensive product that is a bad value.   Once you have a good DAC, if you want to play with streamer sources then more power to you.   There are many ways different streamers might sound different.  With digital and DSP anything is possible.  

@mapman 

I believe you missed my point…you can buy a streamer / DAC for few hundred dollars nowadays and be completely happy with the result. The point I was trying to make, if you are going to go through the trouble of comparing two DAC at extreme ends (atleast in dollar value), use a better streamer to exploit its full potential. A $500 streamer is a definite bottle neck for a $25K DAC. Now if you believe spending beyond $500 on a streamer is waste of money then by all means one can conclude a $25K DAC is a bad value cause you never going to hear differences that can justify spending $25K especially when paired with a $500 streamer or if your entire system is around $30K…It’s all relative!