I've become more interested in trying a modern day R2R dac & have been exploring some tube dacs as well. Basically something outside the standard chip sets. I have a budget of $3k but think around $2k would give me the same results. The Lampi's & Aqua's are way outside my budget but look like real winners. There are just a plethora of Dacs to choose from. Dacs for days.
I've never put much priority towards a dac in the past. I've had burr-brown, wolfson chips, logics, Lexichip2, AKM's, but not sure I actually ever bought a product based solely on its chip used. I've been using a Sabre dac the last couple years in a RME dac. It's all of the bells & whistles of the RME that has made it hard for me to move on from. PEQ function has been a game changer for me. I much prefer it over the minidsp Dirac boxes I've tried in my signal chain. A good tube preamp has helped me overlook some of my subjective feelings on chip/sabre dacs.
Straight wire with gain approach doesn't interest me as much these days. I'm not opposed to any components that "color" the sound as long as I find it appealing to my ears. The last few weeks I've been looking over all the regular mainstream R2R dacs that have been all the rage or in the reviewer headlines. Gustard R26, Holo Cyan, Denafrips, Laiv. I'm kind of leaning towards the Pontus 15th. But I always have to consider is this dac just the flavor of the month in its price category. With it's short return window & origin of manufacturing I consider it a product that once you buy it..it's yours. If I don't like it I'll surely end up having to sell it for a loss.
I've looked into Border Patrol dacs & more recently a company called Prometheus Audio. They sell TVC (transformer) volume control products but have a couple of very good priced dacs using non-oversampling TDA1545 chips. One of their models uses tubes as well. Other tube dacs I that I see getting great user review love made by Lab12 & MHDT. I really enjoy any kit project and the ANK's look interesting.
With my budget I'm thinking the Pontus 15th might be the safe bet. For like half that price I could give something like that TDA1545 tube dac a try. Though I haven't seen any user reviews. Maybe it's because I don't swim in the ultra expensive end of the dac pool that I don't consider Sabre dacs to not be transparent or lacking information. Objective data on my current sabre dac says to me that it is very transparent. I'm definitely to the point of trying something different..modern tube or R2R. I am curious if modern R2R is truly different than what a good AKM/Sabre based dac can give me. I expect that a tube based analog output is definitely different.