How easily can you distinguish between different DACs?

Thanks, everyone, for your shared experiences.  I do appreciate it.

Normally, how I evaluate new gear is to put it in and live with it for a while. Sometimes, the new piece doesn’t play well with whichever pieces are in play that it gets removed within a day or two.

I normally don’t do A/B comparison back and forth after a few songs.  And to me, that sort of comparison gets tedious after a short while.  Picking apart 30 seconds of a few songs gets old pretty quickly, and I generally give up and try to get my mind away from that “analyzing the sound” mindset I get into because once I get there it sometimes takes some time before I can take that hat off and start enjoying the music again.

I sometimes will have to put my 901 Series VI into my system to cleanse myself of audiophilia.  With the 901s, they sound good pretty much anywhere I put them and since my expectations aren’t high, I get back into just listening to the “music” again.

BTW, the two I was comparing was the Perfectwave and Benchmark DAC3.  I heard differences, but am not sure that can’t be attributed to the different XLRs I used going from the DAC into the preamp.  The rest of the system is a Schiit Freya S and mono Aegirs.  I’m late to the Schiit game but man, does this combo sound great!

So good, in fact, that I got my Aleph 2’s back from Pass with new internals this week and an Aleph P sitting by and I’m in no rush to swap the gear.  The speakers now are the Dulcet BEs.

I need to put the Pass gear in, though, just to make sure nothing happened during the transit.  

Thanks again, all.
 

Thanks, duckworp, for sharing your testing results.  

I think most audio gear is so good nowadays that the "diminishing returns" thing kicks in real hard sometimes.

Your post reminds me of a time years back where I bought a new pair of speakers (JMR Trente) and wanted to burn them in for a while.  My main rig at the time was all tubed and was in the $20-$30k range back in early 2000's.  And not wanting to waste tube life I decided to pull out an old, 1970s Pioneer integrated for the burn in purpose.

The speaker cables I used was one of the thinner gauge copper wires bought at radioshack.  And this thing was a mess!  All wadded up making it hard to find the ends.  When I finally found them and hooked up the speakers, it looked like a ball of yarn a few cats had a heyday with.

I had a Marantz 63SE CDP.  I put a disc in to let the speakers break in.  And since I was already there, thought I'd read an audio magazine and listen to the music as a background.

But to my astonishment, the music sounded pretty darn good!  A sub $500 rig was holding its own.

For shitz and giggles I put on a few test tracks being confident the rig would not be able to pull out all the nuances from the tracks that my main rig could.  After a few tracks I stopped, disappointed all that extra money bought so little in return.

At that time I told myself it's ok because I like the audio toys and that had I actually done a long term comparison, I would have noticed the differences right away.

But I didn't do the long term comparison just in case!  ;-)

Not sure if the hearing test question was directed at me, but in my case I did have one done a few months back.  I don't hear past 13k or so, I think.  It might have been even lower.

mhwilliford, have you noticed differences in sound after going to an Aurender?  

I didn't realize what was used as a server had an impact on the sound.

Mhwilliford,

Thanks for sharing what you hear the differences to be.

Appreciate it.