do i need a new DAC

@jag

5 year old DACs are indeed pretty good. However those with the latest 9018 ESS Sabre chips are more technically advanced and measure better. The slight improvement may or may not be audible. I heard a subtle improvement in Benchmark DAC 3 over prior technology (or at least I thought I did). The new ESS chips offer lower distortion and noise floor.

You may also be better served looking for a DAC with correction for inter sample overs (few DACs offer this) and excellent jitter rejection....rather than the latest chip.

+1@soix

The sound converges with different topologies as the technology improves. In the end it boils down to taste. I prefer the most natural sounding DACs and the latest round of DACs in many flavours of topology are very close. The Digital “glare or etched” sound is becoming a thing of the past.

Finally , if you have a Roon or similar you can test your DAC at various sample rates. A good DAC will sound identical on all sample rates. Only poorly implemented DACs sound different due to changing filters and changing conversion methodology or changing jitter and distortion which is modulated between the music and sample rate. A good DAC should convert native red book 44.1 equally well as 192KHz and does not require any software upsampling to sound its best. The software upsampling business is the ugly stepchild born from a multitude of poorly designed DACs that sound different at different sample rates (when mathematically they should not!).