Have dacs changed so much in 10 years.

[tuga]

I sincerely hope not but get where you’re coming from. Ever since I can remember I hankered after hifi kit, now younger people are only interested in one thing, phones. I can’t imagine ever spending £1250 on a phone for examples, I’d rather buy a cartridge!

Young people are insterested in pocket-size personal computers, which also make audio and video calls.
They tend not to use the phone part of their equipment a lot.

 

[Rana]

My own experience is that later DACs just sound "less digital" than earlier ones but without the warm nature of the previous "non-digital" sounding DACs. I have onboard DACs in my two main amp systems which are just breathtakingly transparent. Even the little Topping D10s connected to the PC upon which I write the message is so impressively *non-existent*. Sorry if this reads as nonsense. Just suffice to say I've had many, many DACs over the last 30 years and I'm very impressed with more recent implementations of the art.

 

[allthingsanalog]

Young people are insterested in pocket-size personal computers, which also make audio and video calls.
They tend not to use the phone part of their equipment a lot.

That’s absolutely true! They seem to be a generation of very words at the best of times.

 

[allthingsanalog]

Interesting thread. The real question is, have DAC changed this much since the introduction of CD?
Sometimes I wonder – when I listen to my 40 year-old Philips CD 100, a real music maker, even through the mighty ESLs.
I was listening to an original CD pressing, the Pictures by Solti (Decca, 1982) and it sounded gorgeous.

I have two cd player’s effectively. My new Denon and my existing Tag DAC20. 30 years apart and when just casually listening I often use the Tag, although my new Denon is far advanced the Tag is so musical it's somewhat addictive. When I switch to the Denon it's easy to hear what I’m missing but it's definitely a case of implementation rather than the lastest DAC chip. I certainly don’t find myself wanting with the TAG.

I often watch the British Audiophile on YT and I really rate his videos but he reviews so many Dacs, especially from the likes of Denafrips and it somewhat headache inducing, I just think, another one?

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

my current belief is aligned to the theory that the silicon chip is less important than the PSU, analogue circuits, minimisation of jitter etc.
Hence why my “dac” is probably 15+ years old, but well implemented with a linear PSU and local streaming board so as to avoid USB, SPDIF etc.

Still, I’ve not conducted any comparisons in years, so if there’s someone with a new DAC who fancies a comparison and is in th Surrey area, do ping me

 

[sq225917]

I don't think any one part is the most important, whatever is the bottleneck is the important part, but that can be any bit of the dac, input, clocks, analogue stage, filters chips, they can all be broken. Any component is only as good as its weakest link

 

[tuga]

In 2010, some 5 years after the Benchmark DAC1 first hit the stores, John Siau wrote a piece titled "The Unique Evils of Digital Audio and How to Defeat Them":

https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/ap...evils-of-digital-audio-and-how-to-defeat-them

It's an informative, albeit infomercial, review of digital audio's shortcomings and how they can be addressed.

A S R has produced comparative measurements of the DAC3 vs. the RME ADI-2 Pro/DAC.
There are some differences in performance and I would be very interested in a bilind listening comparison of the 2 DACs, considering that current established audibility thresholds would indicate that based on a typical measurements set the two should be indistinguishable from each other.

It's worth noting that I hear differences between the RME's AKM-bundled filters, and even more marked differences when running the RME in direct/NOS mode and feeding it HQPlayer-upconverted DSD256. Also that Laako's (HQPlayer's developer) UHF measurements show improvements in noise and IMD performance when going from Redbook to PCM705.6kHz (HQP into NOS) to DSD256 (HQP into NOS).
In the piece linked above John Siau describes the distortion caused by digital systems as very similar to the IMD produced by early transistorized audio devices and some of today’s low‐cost audio equipment.