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

My analog chain is top level but the digital is mid level only. In my system, the best sounding DAC so far is the Teac NT-505. No surprise: it sounds better than my little Topping e30ii dac (at almost 10x the price). What IS a surprise, is that both DACs sound much better playing pure DSD with the volume disabled, compared to PCM with volume enabled.

After many years of reliable service, my AMR CD-77 CDP, with its anachronistic TDA 1541A DAC, finally stopped outputting sound.  Not sure what the issue is, but repairs for it would be impractical.  Thus, I decided to pick up another old-school DAC, a Levinson 360S with its 1704K DAC chip.  I love the spaciousness, airy sound of these DACs from the early 2000s, and don't see myself ever getting any new upsampling or DSD DACs.

Follow up. I purchased a Bricasti M21 (with its optional internal media renderer), and it is now resident in my audio system. Initially, I found that while the playback was more clear, the soundstage wider and deeper, imaging was more precise, an overriding brightness spoiled everything else. Fortunately, this brightness issue was resolved by changing my Ethernet cable between my switch and the M21 to a Shunyata Sigma V2 and my interconnect cable fro the M21 to my preamp to a DH Labs Air Matrix Cryo. I can now say that listening to digitally sourced music on my syste is marvelous. 

Owned: Technics SU-R1 streaming dac and my TAD sacd player, which can also be used as a standalone dac.

Heard: Aavik SD-880 streaming dac ....I am convinced that this is the best sounding dac on earth! If there is no trickledown unit in a couple of years, it would suck because this unit costs 70k at the moment (could cause divorce).

I added the Sean Jacobs DC4/ARC6 external LPS to my DAVE stream (M SCALER/OPTO DX Galvanic isolator).  The LPS transformed what I thought was already a great DAC to something extraordinary.  My previous DAC was an OPPO SONICA tube modded by Modwright.  Not to be compared with even an un-modded DAVE.