DAC shopping - Trying to sift through the Hype. Can I trust the reviews these days ??

Tons of great responses.

@jimmyblues1959 Totally agree about the marketing aspect. My speakers are Revival Atalante 3. They are a new speaker company, based in France. The engineer is from Dynaudio. I'm so happy with these. I found them through discussions on a forum.

Point being there have been many DACs mentioned in this thread which I would never have looked up, so many thanks for expanding my search. Totally spending hours reading and searching reviews, while I listen to music. Not a bad way to spend a day.

@dz13 @mitch2 @trivema I really like to try the idea of a DDC. could be an interesting experiment, with low cost.

So how many dac suggestions do we have here on this thread alone? Anyone shopping for a dac should be confused.

My overall take on dacs, this based on countless reviews, opinions and my own listening, is that digital as it pertains to A to D and D to A conversion has finally become a mature technology and industry. Not that difficult to achieve relatively high levels of resolution, transparency in  dacs, presentation is where the greatest differences will be found. And I'm not saying there are NOT meaningful differences in the realm of resolving, transparency, only that even at lower price levels dacs may provide all the resolution many systems are capable of. 

Streaming setups is where the real action is, innovation coming fast and furious. One can't even begin to know what their dac capable of without first attending to the entire streaming chain.

@mm1tt77 Some great info there. I'm very curious about the new LTA dac. I've always dreamed of owning one of their Preamps, but out of my price range. LTA is a solid company.

I do like that my DAC has a separate power supply, it's always best to get the power in it's own chassis. With my Antipodes streamer I also use a Sbooster. As far as streamers go... I like Antipodes or Innuos, because they both support SqueezeLite. That's my ecosystem of choice. Both companies make solid Streamer/Servers.

@Bunkertoy, if you’re interested in R2R dacs and would like to sample the technology without spending a lot of money, you may want to consider the older Audio By Van Alstine dacs. A few years back I purchased a 2008 AVA Insight multibit dac for about $300. It’s really quite good and has me wondering what the logic is in spending thousands of dollars on a dac. However, that’s just my subjective opinion and as such should be taken with a grain of salt.

Best of luck in your search for a new dac and most of all enjoy the journey! 😊

The Harmony DAC is a real surprise, fights way above its weight only negative is it's a little not tube sounding. Also the biggest change in audio quality to me hasn't been cables or components but the switch to the Is2 connection much better than USB and it's easy to tell.