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

Benchmark dacs are terrible sounding, these make dogs go wild with their highly and I mean over the top analytical sound. I also had the Audio Resesrch Dac 1 way back which would sound pretty bad these days. When traveling for work 14 years ago, I had an external battery powered  $750 dac hooked up to my iphone that sounded very good. 
The question should have been, are there any current dacs that sound bad or are not an improvement over what you get in a non-audiophile cd player. I’d still take my dac in my older Sony cd/sacd player over a benchmark dac, and the Sony dac can’t hold a candle to the newer better dacs.

Anyone listen to and had time with the new Hegel D50 DAC ?  https://www.hegel.com/en/products/dac/d50

@curiousjim

I wish you luck!

@jmrrobbie1 

No but there are some reviews on youtube. If I recall, the highs are reputedly somewhat "lively". As soon as I saw that, I crossed it off my list.  Not to say you wouldn't like it. FYI, Listen Up!  is a Hegel dealer and they've offered returns on new Hegel gear in the past. 

@chervokas 

Absolutely fascinating!!  Any penny that bright can get thrown on the tracks can't happen often enough.  Do you mind sharing your background to have that knowledge?

Absolutely fascinating!!  Any penny that bright can get thrown on the tracks can't happen often enough.  Do you mind sharing your background to have that knowledge?

I'm just a guy who is really interested in how stuff works, and that includes the science of perception. You know, we live in this hobby with this objectivist/subjectivist battle sort of bequeathed to us 60 years ago by J. Gordon Holt and Julian Hirsch et al., but our ability to measure sound, and especially our understanding of the science of perception have changed so much in 60 years, it's kind of mooted that whole divide for me.  I read Daniel Levitan's book This Is Your Brain on Music when it was published in 2007, but I really didn't start reading in the science of hearing and psychoacoustics until after watching an episode of Nova called Perception Deception, and realizing how far the science had come and how little I knew about it (in fact, when they teach the general basics of how hearing works to people, it's so oversimplified that most of us, and certainly I previously, have a faulty understanding of it).  

I've also been a musician for most of my 61 years and done a bunch of audio production work, so I knew how to make sounds, yet it seemed like I understood very little of the "last mile" of sound -- hearing and auditory perception.  So, I've just been learning it a little bit, through reading Brian Moore's classic primer, An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing, through reading some of the work of and listening to lectures by the likes of Stephen McAdams, Nina Kraus, Susan Rogers.  I'm just barely a beginner in the subject, but I've learned enough already to realize there are a lot of common misconceptions and widely held partial understandings.