R2R or DAC chips?

No idea, but interested in the response.

But will any of them be better than what you have?

A DAC is a lot like insurance, it's much better to be the one selling it than it is to be the one buying it.

As for spending 2 or 3K on one, that's crazy. You can get a dac that performs optimally for a couple of hundred. For a bit more you can get the RME that performs optimally and has other useful features like parametric EQ that will actually make a difference to the sound. Maybe not for the best but at least it's a real feature you can have some fun playing with.

'More fluid sound?' It's all just a big fantasy. I've been reading a few DAC reviews and the nonsense talked is just astonishing.

Here's a comparison of the Holo audio with the Terminator www.audiostream.com/content/review-denafrips-terminator-dac



Compared to the Terminator, the Spring sounded vague, grayish, and slightly mushy. (In my system, the Spring prefers Roon to upsample files to double DSD, while the Terminator sounded better being fed native-resolution data.) Though it hurts me to admit it, the differences weren’t subtle. The altogether delightful BorderPatrol DAC SE ($1,850 USD), which I happened to have at home for review, didn’t fare much better—easy-going and beguiling in its musicality, it couldn’t match the Terminator in image solidity, tonal density or detail. Then again, given that these DACs cost less than half of the Terminator’s asking price, this wasn’t exactly shocking.


Half the price? Can't possibly be as good. And guess what? 'The differences are not subtle'. No doubt if Border Patrol stuck another five grand onto the price of their DAC the tables would be turned. Especially if they told him before hand  that it was a 'mark 2' with significant upgrades  to... well, it doesn't matter does it? They can tell him any old bollocks since he clearly hasn't got a clue how any of it  works anyway. Seems to be an essential qualification for a professional reviewer nowadays. Sort of the opposite of what you might expect to be the case. 

The reality is that if this bloke did not know which one he was listening to he wouldn't have a clue which was which. And if you switched in a hundred quid DAC  instead of any of the others, he wouldn't even notice the change.

Well I'm not 100% you wouldn't notice and the measurements certainly suggest the Matrix is possibly one of the best dacs in the world but as to whether that translates to sounding better, I don't know.

I do like the look of the cheaper DACS and will probably start there.

The Pecan is staying, this is an excercise in what it'll take to audibly beat it.

This looks stupidly cheap Teradak. Almost too good to be true.

X sabre pro and be done with it.

Blind test of DACs from 2 dollar plugin to £2K Benchmark: www.tomshardware.com/reviews/high-end-pc-audio,3733.html.


Conclusion:


I sank $2000 of my own money into the DAC2 HGC last December, so I subjectively wanted it to sound better than everything else. Tests have shown that it doesn't. I was surprised, but, having been personally involved in the evaluation and believing in the integrity of what we set up, I rationally accept the findings.

Of course, we're ready for the audiophile community to rise up in arms about the statement you'll read next, but it's true that neither an intermediate enthusiast nor a serious one with ~$70,000 in gear at home were able to reliably tell apart any of the four devices once we properly set up a blind test with accurate volume-matching. We actually enjoyed them all as great audio experiences.


Using world-class headphones, a $2 Realtek integrated audio codec could not be reliably distinguished from the $2000 Benchmark DAC2 HGC in a four-device round-up. Again, all four devices sounded great. The same might not apply to full-sized speakers; we can't say, since we didn't test them. But as far as some of the best headphones in the world go, we stand by these test results.

People won’t believe you unless they try it, but I know where you’re coming from. The difference in soundstage I was “hearing” when comparing amps was completely removed when I simply thought of the more “spacious” amp when the other one was playing. 

Rob Watts is spot on.

IMD is as dangerous as THD in my opinion.

A lot of the good stuff pays attention to intermodulation Distortion and in my opinion, those frequencies we are continually told we can't hear, are actually vitally important to the ones you can hear.

All this "Flat response 20-20 is all you need" just isn't true imo.

There are more colours than we can see. The colours we see are directly affected by the colours we can't.

It's the same with sound. There may be frequencies we can't hear, but they have a significant effect on the ones we do.

Look at MP3, you remove frequencies that apparently "don't matter" but you can hear that there's something different about it.

Usually little to nothing over 14kHz from the MP3's I have here, but maybe it depends on the quality of the encoding? which I'm told was a huge issue early on. To prevent the cutter head overloading/overheating, most vinyl has little 'music content' over 15k and most analogue masters seem to have little over 17kHz too, unless they're absolutely fresh recordings - another generalisation but two mastering engineers told me similar so I don't think I'm too off whack in suggesting this.

If you look at the pretty graphs of what some dacs do over 20kHz it can be frightening as apparently noise-shaping pushes a lot of 'stuff' above the audio band. As Oli says above, it's what these dacs do ABOVE 20kHz which can be important and when you look at r2r type dacs, it's not nice.. Most amps can cope with it, but band limited ones may not (Naim had to totally redesign their hf filter in the 72 and subsequent preamps to accommodate this 'stuff,' even from the then ubiquitous TDA1541 chipset and that's fairly well behaved compared to ladder nos types I think)

As an aside, there's lots going on in domestic audio over 20kHz I reckon. You have distortion and noise from vinyl (MC pickups reproduce cutter ringing at 30 - 50kHz very well it seems) and SA-CD players especially, have noise, modern relaxed hf filters on dacs which don't always 'die' over 22kHz as theoretically they should, metal dome tweeters going bananas at 25 - 30kHz and the whole noise shaping in some amps can possibly be an influence. I don't think anyone's researched this much though, apart from possibly Rob Watts, who's claiming to look down at minus 300db for noise modulation and so on (I didn't think test gear could reliably 'do' half that, but I'm maybe mis representing his words and findings.

Colours we cant see dont affect anything we can. UV has no effect on how we perceive colours it's well proven and understood.

However if you take a pure 10khz tone and modulate it with a 30khz carrier, its no longer 10khz its 10khz plus and minus a little bit, so becomes a warble tone. This does not happen with colour. Sound is compression and rarefaction, light is purely additive.

Visible light isn't modified by invisible light. That's nonsense.

No, it isn't.

Every colour you see is a blend of other colours, apart from primary colours.

If you were to remove a percentage of one of those colours, it would be a different shade.

You spray paint over certain colours to get get different results. I know this is true, my best mate does this Sh#t everyday.

People have this tendacy to think frequencies act individually, they do not. Sound is a blend of multiple frequencies as you Know. When you remove one, you alter the others.

I haven't looked.