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

I’ve owned DACs since 2007, and overall, their sonic quality seems higher now. In other words, a rising tide (technological progress] generally raises all boats.

But I do hear significant differences between delta/sigma designs vs multibit and NOS (all 3 of my current DACs are NOS). As soon as I was exposed to my first non-d/s DAC, I heard these differences quite clearly.

I understand that NOS DACs (by and large) measure poorly compared to d/s. I'm not an audio designer and just don't care about that. Sound is all I care about.

To my ears, d/s designs tend to sound clinical and cold, edgy, while NOS never does. On the other hand, subjectivity being the essence of our hobby, it must be acknowledged that some people love the sound of clinical, cold edgy DACs.

All I can do is figure out what my sonic preferences are (audio experience buttressed by exposure to music IRL), then select component based on that.

@knownothing - measures what exactly? Frequency response, noise and harmonics are only metrics of ONE frequency. My major was in signal processing and spectral analysis. For example, does anyone measure equipment using white or pink noise (better representation of actual music) and compares spectrum? Or, better still, take a piece of music, play back via two DACs, then measure difference in analog outputs using high precision instruments? Never seen any measurements. So there.

Remember when equipment measured awesome but then someone discovered that some gear sounds better and that, apparently, signal slew rate is very important and not just sinewave with 0.00001% THD. A bit later people discovered "joy" of intermodulation and started measure transfer of 19 KHz + 20 KHz since it produces 1 KHz parasite. Ah, but there are so many frequency pairs like this. So you have minimized 19 and 20. But what about 18.7 and 19.95? Or triplets? Or quads? Or that white noise that includes all frequencies?

@mikhailark +1

@aberyclark 
"I have the Topping E70Velvet and it sounds superb."
I am curious. How much opera do you listen to? How many Cds with sopranos do you have?

@mikhailark Reviewers like Amir at ASR also include multitone tests to look at more extensive IMD phenomena:

In terms of music comparison, there is software like Delta Wave Null Comparator that can facilitate doing exactly that. To use with DACs, you have to confront that the ADC will have digitization limitations. For speakers and headphones, you have microphone/space considerations that are better accommodated using systems like Klippel that use repeated measurements to achieve anechoic approximations in regular spaces.

I recommend Audio Science Review as a resource for learning more about measurement techniques.