The sound quality from DACs - is it all the same?

😊I think exactly the same as you... You said it well...

My two different main dac are relatively low cost but i optimized everything around them and especially put them where the synergy is good and upgrading is meaningless for me , it will be marginal and very costly... I do0nt even dream it because it appear meaningless acoustically ...

I own a Nos TDA 1543 dac , and an Hidizs dac ; each one with battery internal...The NOS one with my active speakers, the most analytical one with my headphone...All is perfect...

@mahgister , A lower cost dac will benefit a lot from certain types of tweaks, vibe isolation, usb filters (IFI, audioquest, etc), ethernet filters, better power supply, power filters, cables, dedicated power lines and so on....If your overall system infrastructure tweaks are up to a certain certain standard, you can narrow the gap a lot between lower priced dacs and higher priced dacs. The higher priced dacs don’t benefit that much from above such tweaks perceptibly. If you understand circuit design/and are handy, you could tinker with some components in the output stage and so on...

Reviewers exaggerate differences they heard between dacs at different price brackets. It is a lot more subtle than what these guys claim. Guys in untreated spaces with poor or restricted setups (no distance between speakers/frontwalls, listener/backwall, etc) have already nullified most benefits of higher end dacs...might as well work with the room, i.e., get other fundamentals right before coming to the dac.

"What is the difference between troll and man?”

Cousins.

“ … Do DACs make a difference? - I Bought a $10,000 DAC…”

I have owned several different Dacs with different setups, but I often wonder about the question at least at a theoretical level. I currently have Holo May Kte which is very good sounding Dac. It is non over sampled R2R DAC which also has impressive measurements. I can definitely hear sound quality differences between DACs. However, these differences may not come off as obvious, meaning if you play a song with those DACs, you’d still hear that same song. If the music is very well recorded, it would be more challenging to decern any differences. However, DAC that sounds good to my ears has little or no listening fatigue so that I can listen to it for hours. I had Chord Hugo 2 and Mojo 1 & 2 previously. Imo, Rob Watts designs some fantastic dacs and these chord dacs produced really good PRAT. But, there were some unnatural characteristics with the sound that made me to stop listening after an hour or so. After Chord dacs, I had Moon 390 DAC / streaming preamp. It was an all in one unit that performed well, I thought. It had tad less detail than Hugo 2 but it definitely threw a bigger stage and deeper depth. The Moon sounded more natural to me so I had much onger listening sessions. Once I got May DAC, I could tell how inferior the sound of Moon was. From naturalness, tone / timber, and imaging perspective, the Moon DAC could not match.

Having said all that, I think about a perfectly converted analog signal which is in an absolute form. Any deviation from the perfect signal is an imperfect one. Knowing this, and DACs have compromises in their design and implementation, so I expect some variations of sound differences. However, these differences can narrow as they get closer to that perfect signal.

I have had a number of DACs in my system over the last few years: Cambridge Audio DacMagic 100, Cambridge Audio CXN V2, Ayre EX8 (with the digital card), Chord Dave.  There is definitely a difference: e.g., compared to the CXN V2, the Chord Dave has a lot more texture in its bass, better soundstage/separation of instruments, and wonderful detail and air in the higher frequencies.  These are smaller differences in comparison to e.g., moving from a $1000 pair of speakers to a $14000 pair or a similar upgrade in integrated amplifiers. I would upgrade DACs beyond $1000 once you have already reached a high level for Speakers (I find significant improvements at least till the $10K level) and Amplifiers (I find significant improvements at least till the $6K level).