Dac Technology Mature?

Chord seems to have the only new DAC technology making an appearance with its DAVE & upsampler taking on the $100,000 plus DACs at a fraction of the price. It appears to be an updated version of what made Wadia famous in its day that everyone else has given up on as an approach. Alan Sircom, the editor of HIFI+ prefers DAVE to the big boys.

Great analogue stages really matter, but apparently, the great tube gear designers aren’t going there. i.e. could you imagine one designed by Vladimir Lamm?

768 might make a meaningful difference that may get people to start paying attention but I suspect it will be a multiple of even that number, that will bring back some semblance of the resolution available on really, really good vinyl playback. Sceptics here need to make the comparison before saying otherwise.

Any discussion about DAC Technology should include the developments made by Rob Watts and John Franks of Chord Electronics. Custom Coded FPGA chips with over 500k lines of code replace off the shelf DAC chips. Thier new Hugo TT 2 also receives the benefit of an upgrade from 4-element design to a 10-element design, which works in harmony with the radically upgraded FPGA and code.  In comparison to the 256-tap filters that traditional chip DACs may run, Hugo TT 2’s more powerful Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA, custom-coded by Chord Electronics’ Rob Watts, with 86x 208MHz cores running in parallel to create an advanced 16FS WTA 1 filter with 98,304-taps. That horsepower does more than just connect the dots of data to create an analog waveform, it creates a soundscape.

The Linn Klimax DSM Katalyst is WOW sounding. Go
out and hear one. You will be drooling. All Klimax DSs can be upgraded to the 4th Generation DAC Linn make today. Also the older boards can be Renewed to play in other rooms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1t6hZdKXLw  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPGKEV7v7T8

Mature? Yes. 
How far and how fast?
Getting out the CAL delta transport, the Sonic Frontiers Ultra Jitterbug and Theta Pro Basic IIa DAC for demo against my Oppo BDP-83SE. Will report how things “improved” from 1993 to 2010. 

For me, I like my converters to be transparent - If I want color I'd rather do that in other areas of the audio chain.

To test the transparency of digital audio is actually pretty easy. You just have to make a digital copy of an analog recording (tape or vinyl, for instance) and do a double blind test to see if anyone can hear the difference. I believe such a test was done with analog tape but I can't seem to find it on google. Does anyone know about it?