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

@mikhailark Well, attacking him (inaccurately, nonetheless) doesn't actually demonstrate the validity of your claims. You will need to actually show that the limited precision of a given FFT measurement results in audible differences. You could also try out the Delta Wave system and see if you can use that as a path down the golden road towards enlightening us all!

You can also check out my presentation of the debunking of Fourier indeterminacy and related claims in fora here and at the Roon community. Personally, I have nothing invested in any of this, but I find it curious how assertive so many folks are about their limited knowledge.  Epistemic humility is the cornerstone of scientific progress.

Please show!

@markwd - I owe you NOTHING dear. You go to ASR and discuss "audible" with your buddies and test new awesome $100 DACs. 

@mikhailark But it would be totally awesome and change everything if you could prove what you are claiming! It would be sooooo cooooool.

@markwd Dude, all proofs are at ASR, you know everything. Everything is the same, measurements are everything. Go chat there.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263224123009363

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a cornerstone of digital signal processing, generating a computationally efficient estimate of the frequency content of a time series. Its limitations include: (1) information is only provided at discrete frequency steps, so further calculation, for example interpolation, may be required to obtain improved estimates of peak frequencies, amplitudes and phases; (2) ‘energy’ from spectral peaks may ‘leak’ into adjacent frequencies, potentially causing lower amplitude peaks to be distorted or hidden; (3) the FFT is a discrete time approximation of continuous time mathematics.

What else do you need to know about FFT being just an approximation? LMAO. Now you gonna tell me "but it is so small so it is not audible". Right?

@mikhailark Sure, but you are shifting your arguments around concerning the validity of multitone measurements (you assert they are insufficient but do not demonstrate why) and now you are asserting that known limitations of frequency domain methods make those measurements unhelpful or unreliable or something. It's just unsupported and baldly argumentative.

It would be very cool, however, if you demonstrated that you can show something important about audio systems that goes beyond the measurement methodologies widely employed! Sooooooo cooooool!