New vs. old DACs - opinions?

I agree with Bob, in general, newer DACs more resolving and exposing of warts, older less resolving and more forgiving nature.

I just recently revisited a review from Feb. 1992 Stereophile of the ML No.30 DAC by Robert Harley. This was a state of the art processor priced at 14k in '92. Harley raves about this machine as head and shoulders above anything else available at the time, needed it's own category in recommended products. He describes precisely the sonic attributes I hear in my present digital setup, a newer and lower priced setup. I also hear these attributes in current more upmarket digital from Wadia and Esoteric.

My take is digital, at least at the top of the market is making real strides forward. Now, do these improvements trickle downward into the less expensive spread? I would think this can only be ascertained on a case by case basis.

I do think a lot of newer digital relies solely on processing speed and other parts upgrades without addressing other, perhaps more important aspects of performance. I certainly see a lot of newer digital with very low parts count, weak power supplies, just lots of empty space, selling at serious money. In this case, I might say the older digital with more guts may be better. Still, a case by case comparison would be needed.

My own experience has been that digital made some major strides in the reasonably priced spread somewhere around 2000. Generalizing, I would look limit my purchases to digital after this period. The highest priced earlier digital may also be a viable choice, if I could get a ML No. 30 or 30.5 at perhaps 4 or 5k (I don't know current market prices), that could be very enticing.

"The specifications for D/A chips have improved over the years". But has the sound improved? Chris Bryant, whom I have already quoted, summarizes it like this.

To my mind there has been a general and continuing downward shift in the sound quality extracted from DACs over the past 20 years. DACs are produced by semiconductor manufactures and require large volumes to make operations economic as most of these will find their way into cheap products, there is little incentive to create good sounding components.
The DACs available for the HIFI designer will also be found in computer sound cards, personal digital stereos and televisions. As a result many modern examples have lost their audiophile verve, as the semiconductor manufactures prefer to make cheaper and lower powered devices better adapted to their principal, high volume customer's needs.
These mass produced low-bit converters do deliver excellent measured performance, but often seem unable to deliver the goods when real high fidelity sound reproduction is required."
This is the other side of the "if it is newer it must be better" argument. Personally, I have not heard enough decoders on my system to have fixed ideas on the subject. I only introduced these ideas to point out that there are differences between informed observers as to the general sound trend in CD. One distressing element is that the big Japanese audio companies who , with Phillips, were the driving force behind CD originally took their best designers off it's further development years ago. I think there are two things we can agree on: One , each DAC has to be evaluated on its own merits and Two, after all this time CD should sound better that it currently does.

Stanwall - you mentioned your DAC playing at 96kHz better than 192kHz. It is because every DAC chip has lower THD at 100kHz than 192kHz update rate. For that very reason Benchmark decided to update only at 110kHz output DAC chip that is capable of 24bit/192kHz.

As for multibit or one bit dilema they have specific sound. Most of converters now are one bit (delta-sigma) and even SACD is a byproduct of delta-sigma just before filtering. Most of people don't complain about sound of SACD or DSD recording maybe because it is not in priciple but in realization. It is very difficult to keep exact timing with high oversampling rates and delta sigma end-up not much better than multibit converter. Multibit is limited by tolerance of component to about 18 bit but there are improvements on the scheme. DCS makes RING-DAC where they shuffle components inside (ring of 5 if remember correctly) to get an average value. ARCAM bought license from them and used RING-DACs in earlier FMJs (FMJ-23 I believe). They had poor production yield and stopped but I believe DCS still makes them.

This is an interesting question that seems a bit too general.

One thing I can say is that in the last 20 years, transports have gotten a lot better. This is one reason I have a difficult time comparing old DACs I have had to the newer ones. I know my transport is tons better than older ones I have had. One does not know what their DAC can do until they hook it up to a killer transport. And 20 years ago, those were way WAY expensive. The cost of great transports has fallen a lot.

I always recommend getting a great transport first (I like a music server with an Empirical Audio Off Ramp Turbo device) using the best ripping and playback software). You hook this up to almost any DAC and you are going to have a great idea how that DAC performs. So many transports back in the day (10 - 20 years ago) were awful... And this did not contribute to the sound of older DACs in the least.

Keith