High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.

@erik_squires

Are you saying nobody knows or cares what polarity is anyway and wouldn’t notice if they got it wrong. So a quick polarity check with a button is superfluous.

Are you saying that you can swap cables quick enough to A and B back and forth for polarity? I find that an amazingly archaic approach that could easily wind up in errors between one speaker and another and one component and another.

I listened to a 50K system recently and wound up informing the owner something was out of phase. He was puzzled initially but thanked me after he fixed it. Not sure how long that situation had gone on - a simple switch makes it much easier to check.

I have pro gear that has a phase inversion button. Kind of useful to quickly check things. I am surprised that nobody has this. Amazing that this hobby values fancy cables and the effort that goes into swapping that fancy stuff out but a simple polarity switch seems too complex!

Yes for me it is low jitter, better differential linearity and less noise with 6 bit sigma delta DACs that are the reason for recent improvements in sound.

Upsampling helps randomize differential non-linearity.

As usual, noise is always assumed to be random and if high enough it can be all filtered out. The reality is that it is rarely perfectly random. Just like jitter, if it was simply all random then it would never have been a problem to begin with.

R2R has its merits as a technology but is limited in resolution due to differential non-linearity. 6 bit delta sigma DACs are kind of hybrid between old single bit sigma delta and R2R.

That said DSD is still a highly elegant approach especially at 4x or higher, as it inherently has great linearity and then noise is pushed way up and far out of the way.

It seems that DAC chips do suffer from everything being crammed together on a chip. So discrete DACs like PS Audio DS and others seem to have a more analog sound even if their measured performance is not as impressive as the latest Sabre based DAC.

Lots of ways to skin a c@t!

Totally agree. DACs are finally getting things right. Although upsampling has been used for at least 20 years it is only recently that the higher quality of the upsampling/filtering has improved enough to really make digital more analogue sounding.

Alternatively many folks have found that quality upsampling in a software like Roon can overcome many of the deficiencies in some of these older DACs.