How easily can you distinguish between different DACs?

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! 

@lalitk

+1

@lalitk +2 ,  the impact is obvious 

Hmm well I would likely not recommend a $500 streamer and a $25000 DAC.

Having said that what evidence is there that spending more necessarily means better sound? You would hope that would be the case but price alone assures nothing.

Has anyone attempted to use say a ~ $500 Cambridge mxn10 with various dacs at a wide range of costs and compared to other more expensive streamers. I have not but I do have that Cambridge and I would not rule it out without evidence to the contrary.

I have seen at least one published case where a $10k dac was objectively measured to perform worse than many DACs for 1/10th the cost.  Ouch!

So price alone assures not much. But I agree it makes no sense financially to even think about dropping $25k on any one component then cheap out on others. That’s not to say it is assured that the total investment in both might not outperform many other pairings.