Is there any such thing as a bad sounding DAC these days?

When the very first CD players came out, Philips (who as co-inventors of CD had an inside run, after all) were widely deemed to have a better sound than their competitors.

Philips used quadruple oversampling which allowed much more gentle filtering than the sharp brick-wall filters needed for a hard cut-off around 44-kHz.

On the other hand, with the laser resistor-trimming technology used back then, it was hard to get monotonic increases in output to match the input bit settings.  Philips simply dropped the last two bits.

@stuartk 

I was surprised at the price, as it’s over $1000 LESS than retail!  Unless something has changed,  it was supposed to go for around $10,000 here. I haven’t sprung it on my wife yet, but there’s no time like the present.😉😉

My first DAC was a Scott Nixon USB. It was limited to 44k/16, but sounded very good. 

@mapman ....  Considering 'all of the above'...*ah* Yeah...*L*

Contrasted to speaker cables, lifted or no, IC's, USBees', and the conduit that one trips over on it's way to the breaker box....X the $'s to determine such.... ;)

(Rude, but bare with....😏...)  Audio gear and underwear have details in common.

It needs to be 'comfy' enough to forget, because if it isn't.....

Comes in all sorts of materials, colors, types.....boxers to g-strings....loud or subtle...

That being said 15 years ago there we’re great sounding dacs                            Mark Levinson 31 , there were many Multibit ladder chips out there from              Burr Brown , and Analog devices , even Phillips