Benchmark dacs are terrible sounding, these make dogs go wild with their highly and I mean over the top analytical sound. I also had the Audio Resesrch Dac 1 way back which would sound pretty bad these days. When traveling for work 14 years ago, I had an external battery powered $750 dac hooked up to my iphone that sounded very good.
The question should have been, are there any current dacs that sound bad or are not an improvement over what you get in a non-audiophile cd player. I’d still take my dac in my older Sony cd/sacd player over a benchmark dac, and the Sony dac can’t hold a candle to the newer better dacs.
Is there any such thing as a bad sounding DAC these days?
I think the problem of DAC for quality audio has been pretty much universally solved. Not to say all DACs are equal, they aren’t, but do any that really matter these days not sound “good”?