What the Best Dac have you heard or owned. How could you tell it was that good.

Owned: Areas 12th-1 so far; this has kept my Cen Grand DSDAC 1.0 Super Clock off my rack for 6 weeks, and I don't feel like I'll be changing this anytime soon. The Cen Grand is 3x the cost of the Ares, but it doesn't come close to sheer enjoyment compared the the Ares. This is of course my subjective observation in my system, my room, my humble ears.

For £1k+, the Ares12th-1 is a monster

@painter24 20th year in the hobby. Infigo method 4 DAC. I’m done. Does everything I want it to. Went from a solution 540. I have owned 5 or 6 in my life. I’m truly done. We were part of a shootout on Whatsbestforum. Went up against the best of the best and held its own.  I’m happy. 

I have had a Sim Moon 650D with auxiliary power supply ($18K), my current Audio Research Reference CD 9SE ($17K), Berkeley Reference Alpha 3 ($22K), dCS Lina with external clock ($20K), in my system and heard the top of the line Linn and mid-tier (I don’t remember the exact cost. Also Ayre, McIntosh, Schiit Yggdrasil, and Gungnir… and several more.

In general, these first group are all very good DACs and not including the Sim, the differences are very small (since this was ten years old now, hopefully there is a big improvement with their contemporary offering.. it wasn’t very good). The Audio Research wins for me. It is ever so slightly more musical and natural. In a real head to head the Berkeley (which I fully expected to be coughing up the extra $5K for, I liked the ARC better). The difference is very very very small… tiny more detail in the Berkeley. There are real small differences in presentation. If I had to rank them on a scale of 1 - 10 the difference would be between 9, 9.5 and 10… at most. I would say this is true for most DACs over $7K or $8K.

Now streamers make a much bigger difference in general. I think DACs get really good more quickly as you invest more ( up to $5K - $7K). Streamers have a much steeper improvement. So once you have a good DAC say over $5K mating it with a Aurender N100, N200, N20, W20SE each brings really big, non-subtitle differences. This is a generalization… you have to go with the spirt of it. Not taking a Yggdrasil and mating it with a W20SE. If you’re in the high end of the streamer line up, you are going to need to mate it with a better DAC than a $5K one to get everything out of the streamer, but the magnitude of the DAC improvements will be smaller.

DCS is one that seemed ahead of the pack a number of years back.

Many great sounding DACs at all price points these days.  I bought a dongle for $80 that is amazing.