How easily can you distinguish between different DACs?

despite my having tried so so many dacs in the last few years, i would say that a decent dac in the $1000-2500 range will quite fully please most folks here with good systems in, say, the $5,000-$25,000 range... yes there are a few bad ones out there (sonically) but most sound quite good and the differences in sound between the good ones can be rather subtle to most... please see my original thread for further comments on specific dacs

i pursued the vast dac trials mostly out of interest (and sheer boredom during the covid shut-in period), and a desire for learning just what the span of sonic performance is among dacs.... in the last few months i have done no new dac trials, and i have left a gustard r26 and a chord qutest plugged in, with my high dollar dacs put aside (msb, weiss etc)... i am just listening to music, not the gear, and i am very very happy enjoying ith either the chord or the r26

i would say among good dacs, the feature set and form factor should drive the choice, once you have decided if you want a dac that is sonically in the sharper vs smoother school of presentation...

@invalid

The best way to determine the ability of the digital portion of a DAC is the signal to noise ratio. I would go with whatever DAC had the most neutral analog section be it discreet or an op amp. There are some pretty wild chips out there today and the only thing discreet will do for sure is cost you more. 

Because I require more DAC channels than most two channel people I go for digital preamps that have the DACs built in. I require 6 Dac channels. The unit that I will have shortly has 8 DAC channels built in along with room and speaker control, bass management and high resolution digital EQ. I digitize my phono stage.  

I can sympathize with this question, as well as the various responses.  Because I was unable to distinguish in double-blind listening over a couple of weeks a Weiss 502 from the DA2 built into my C2700, I sent the Weiss back (shout out to The Music Room for being super easy to work with) and instead went back to the source for improvement, adding an Aurender N200 to my system (replacing my PC running Roon as digital streamer/server).  I believe this will allow easier distinguishing of DAC quality, as the rest of my system would be judged as "reasonable" by most (MC462, C2700, B&W 802D4).

One more thing - I think double-blind tests are interesting and certainly good data to have as you make a judgement about how new gear sounds (or doesn't) to YOU (even you capricious folks out there LOL) - but long-term listening in a relaxed (not analytical) state is the real tell for me.  After all, listening in that state is where most of us want to experience magic.

@mhwilliford

Congratulations and good call on improving the source by switching to N200. Now if you bring a high quality DAC, you should be able to appreciate the nuances (or not) over your integrated DA2. I also like your approach of long term listening before forming any conclusions.

I believe the main issue with DAC costing 2x, 3x or 4x times is not whether they sound better or not. It’s the added cost that doesn’t quite commensurate with the perceivable differences in SQ. Most folks are quite content with a $1500 DAC that gets them close to 80-85% performance of a DAC’s costing, say $5K.

Not sure if the hearing test question was directed at me, but in my case I did have one done a few months back.  I don't hear past 13k or so, I think.  It might have been even lower.

mhwilliford, have you noticed differences in sound after going to an Aurender?  

I didn't realize what was used as a server had an impact on the sound.