Do all competently designed DACs sound almost the same?

[TheDecameron]

I remember hearing a Theta for the first time in the early 90s and it was head and shoulders above other stuff at the time. Has the field closed now?

 

[amdismal]

DACs contain amplifiers. If you think all amps sound the same, then all DACs sound the same. There is less difference in the digital stage than in the output stage, I think.

 

[spanna]

I've never heard anything that doesn't sound different to anything else. DAC's are no exception.

 

[73Chaz]

My experience is that they sound similar. You could probably tell that A doesn't equal B but whether you could identify A and B is another question - I doubt that I could.

 

[Werner]

If these DACs are all designed to a common and complete set of requirements specifications, and if the implementation is competent, then indeed they will sound very similar.

If there are any obvious and blatant audible differences then one or more of the requirements have been violated, or the design was not done well.

 

[Purité Audio]

If these DACs are all designed to a common and complete set of requirements specifications, and if the implementation is competent, then indeed they will sound very similar.

If there are any obvious and blatant audible differences then one or more of the requirements have been violated, or the design was not done well.

I completely agree, although some dacs are better designed and implemented than others, there are a few chips that have a high enough output not to need a seperate output stage.
Keith.

 

[darrenyeats]

If these DACs are all designed to a common and complete set of requirements specifications, and if the implementation is competent, then indeed they will sound very similar.

If there are any obvious and blatant audible differences then one or more of the requirements have been violated, or the design was not done well.

This.

 

[Robert]

I remember hearing a Theta for the first time in the early 90s and it was head and shoulders above other stuff at the time. Has the field closed now?

Yes it's closed to virtually nothing.
Oh and well done for using 'almost' because that's important.

The problem we have currently is that some in the 'anything that can potentially make a different will make an audible difference' crew have aligned with a certain strand of audiophile engineer who propagate this view.

It completely ignores all reference to audibility limits and only works with reliance on bad demonstration methods, just like most fakery.

I've no issue with anyone producing a dac which really does sound obviously different, just be honest and explain why as hinted at by Werner above.

 

[killie99]

And there in lies the problem. Like just about any other piece of electronics, DACs are build to a price point and to achieve that price invariably corners are cut. Cheaper parts get sourced and invariably they affect the sound.
Just like any correctly designed and built amp should should the same as any other correctly designed and built amp but we all know they don't sound the same.

I've owned a fair old number of DACs over the years and they all sound different, but I will agree that £ for £ there isn't the differences you get with amps.

 

[Purité Audio]

Remember NOS designs and valve output stages will of course sound quite different .
Keith.

 

[Robert]

And there in lies the problem. Like just about any other piece of electronics, DACs are build to a price point and to achieve that price invariably corners are cut. Cheaper parts get sourced and invariably they affect the sound.

Only to a point, and only at the very budget end because the parts cost for a good dac is very low indeed. In today's world we can mass produce electronics and get reliable results for peanuts. The proposition is different for example with a good quality turntable or tonearm where there is reliance on precision mechanical engineering.

 

[davidsrsb]

This depends on whether you count the TDA1541 designs and filterless oversampling with loads of ultrasonics as "competent".
Handling 0dB FS properly still seems to be beyond some designers too

 

[jirij]

If you happen to own an MDAC, kindly ask JohnW to point out a single 120R resistor (well, 4 in total, 2 per balanced channel), so you can replace it with another 120R resistor, do a blind test and get surprised.
I'm personally willing to say that all well designed DACs sound better than onboard Realtek sound cards found on most PC motherboard.

 

[Steven Toy]

In light of reading this thread and swallowing the facts herein I have decided that my new MDAC will sound identical to the one in my CDQ so I'm cancelling my order.

NOT!

 

[JezmondTutu]

It can be massive difference depending on how you implement it in your system & what system you have.

For example, moving from a dac with a fixed output to a dac with vol control meant I lost my preamp so the difference was substantial.

I bought a Theta dac on the back of listening to one in my bosses (good) balanced valve system. Sounded very average in mine, indeed I thought a borrowed Beresford Caimen sounded better.

I'd say there is a substantial difference between a current budget dac and a higher end dac - that's my personal experience anyway, possibly in part due to one being run without async though.You are talking about £200 against five grand though so there bloody well should be some difference!

 

[adam69]

Everything always sounds the same, the only differences that exist are our imaginations and the words we use to describe what we imagine and how much we are prepared to pay for having an vivid imagination.

 

[sergeauckland]

Everything always sounds the same, the only differences that exist are our imaginations and the words we use to describe what we imagine and how much we are prepared to pay for having an vivid imagination.

I wouldn't quite go as far as to say "everything", but agree with the rest of the quote above. As far as DACs go, I class them together with all modern competent electronics, in that perceived differences disappear on level-matched blind testing unless the design is deliberately done in such a way as not to be transparent.

As Robert said above, if a designer wants to be different and stand out on demos as being different, that's fine as long as it's clearly understood that they are doing something different, not necessarily better and certainly less accurate.

S.

 

[Hepokatti]

These kind of topics would be far more interesting if people could provide genuine examples of real equipment that does everything so well there is no need to look further.

One could ask, for example, is Musical Fidelity V-DAC 2 so good, that spending any more money is nonsens.

Another example could be to ask the same question about MDAC - but to both of these questions, the answer is yes and no at the same time, as people have very little experience of such sort that would be relevant to anyone else.

 

[maxflinn]

I wouldn't quite go as far as to say "everything", but agree with the rest of the quote above. As far as DACs go, I class them together with all modern competent electronics, in that perceived differences disappear on level-matched blind testing unless the design is deliberately done in such a way as not to be transparent.

As Robert said above, if a designer wants to be different and stand out on demos as being different, that's fine as long as it's clearly understood that they are doing something different, not necessarily better and certainly less accurate.

S.

Totally agree, well said.

 

[adamdea]

If these DACs are all designed to a common and complete set of requirements specifications, and if the implementation is competent, then indeed they will sound very similar.

If there are any obvious and blatant audible differences then one or more of the requirements have been violated, or the design was not done well.

Seems difficult to argue with although I guess it depends what the complete specification is.

The missing bit in practical terms is to add that almost all the difficult stuff is now available in off the shelf chips and these do or are capable of doing most of the work. There was one person who used to post on this forum and made dacs which got some very good reviews, and it was quite obvious that his grasp of digital electronics was not profound.

My DAC (not made by him) which had I paid list price for it would have cost £4k, contains one single wolfson 8741 chip which not only converts d/a but has a 32 bit volume control sample rate converter and 6 or so filters. My DAC uses the off the chip stuff for all of this, so where is the bespoke engineering? Maybe in the clock circuits? Don't think there is a proprietary pll or anything.

It has some big transformers and a fancy output stage and I guess that's where any sonic differences from other wolfson 8741 dacs come from. It also has a fancy ram buffer, (but the version 1 didn't).

Of course there are some DAC designers who do use bespoke chips and program the filters etc.

But the OPs question can't be answered without running into the belief systems round these parts. If you believe that wire and rubber feet sound different then how can dacs *not* sound different. If you believe that every single different filter on your DAC sounds different then how can two differentt
DACs *not*sound different? And of course we get back to view that it is apparently impossible to produce a complete specification because of currently unquantifiable but apparently audible time domain effects. If so it would be pretty difficult to make two dacs sound the same if you tried.