“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”
William Bruce Cameron (quoted famously by Albert Einstein)
From personal experience, and accounts of other audio friends, I’ve listened to many of the inexpensive overseas and US made top measuring chip DACS as measured by a well known “scientific” audio forum.
These DACS sound mediocre at best. Nominally gray, flat, electronic sounding. Lack of: color, life, and inner vitality that keeps one from really getting something out of a good listening session. DACS like this are good for cars, desktop PC speakers, etc but can’t compare to the much better musical DACS available.
Basic measurements are an important part of design and basic functional verification but their response to passing musical signals and the relevance of that analog result to “musicality”, simply can’t be quantified. As Nelson Pass said, IIRC, our ears are not microphones, and our brains are not oscilloscopes”.