The sound quality from DACs - is it all the same?

@khughes 

The question is, do you want one that *has* a distinct sound of it's own? Or one with the most accurate reproduction? The former will be a form of fixed tone control you may not want if you're an equipment junkie and change components frequently. Maybe it fits with the next gear iteration, maybe not. This type of "voicing" is one likely culprit for what I consider to be the "system synergy" canard.

Yes, this remains a key question for any budding audiophile.

It's quite important in that knowing exactly what you want can save you a lot of time and money in the coming years ahead.

It's also the kind of question that I never once considered. For some unknown reason I just assumed that the more highly regarded equipment espoused by the magazines that I was reading would inevitably be more accurate.

Obviously, that was not the case back then, and I doubt whether it's the case now.

@jackhifiguy 

It's a valid question and I'm a little disappointed to see such hostility and defensiveness expressed in some of the responses.

It's a fact that DACs use different components, especially processing chips, but is it also a fact that any of us can actually hear these differences?

Can anyone routinely identify a $100 DAC from a $10,000 one if both were hidden from sight?

Well, can they?

Can anyone?

As for ASR, instead of being grateful for all the all of the brilliant work Amir is doing in sharing his valuable knowledge with us and shedding some much needed light in areas that were previously obscured, again many of us seem to be adopting a defensive mindset in the face of what is perceived as a threat.

A threat to what?

Knowledge or vested self interests?

@mahgister 

If they did spoke about the primacy of acoustic instead of suggesting upgrading multiple times each audiophile would learned to direct his focus on other less costly acoustic solutions than electronic upgrades only ... There is many acoustic solutions even for living room...

Magazine will loose their share of publicity if they did otherwise...

Yes, it can be a real eye opener if you ever see the cluttered listening rooms that some rather well known reviewers use at home.

Fair enough they may have the same space restraints as the rest of us, but purpose built, carefully set up and treated, they're not.

@jssmith 

Unless they can statistically prove over a larger population that it sounds better, it don't mean jack. The ultimate approach in audio so far has been Floyd and Olive's at Harman, where they can predict with 0.86 correlation coefficient which speaker listeners will prefer in blind listening tests. And when bass extension is similar, that number goes up to 0.996. Believing anything someone or some company subjectively says without going through this kind of statistical scrutiny is akin to believing in get-rich-quick schemes. Unfortunately, the human psyche is built to want to believe in these kinds of schemes.

The exploitation of human frailty is often the marketers goal.

On the other hand folks like Floyd Toole, Sean Olive and more recently Amir Majidimehr at ASR have done some good work in ushering in a new era of measurement based "statistical scrutiny" for which an increasing number of peoplebseem to be grateful.

@deludedaudiophile

"I am an innate skeptic, but my experience and others demonstrated knowledge leads me to believe those who can demonstrate real expertise as opposed to those who claim it by virtue of simply using something."

Me too, although my background in physics amounts only to a fluked O level (one of the papers was a multiple choice).

A few years back, to cut a long story short, I needed to solder in a tiny capacitor, were talking 2/3 mm, on the back of my CD player’s circuit board to allow it to play CDRs.

A rather unsuccessful attempt which resulted in 3 outcomes, none of which resembed what I was looking for.

a) I almost wrecked the circuit board

b) I almost burned a hole in my jeans due to the frustration of repeated failure.

c) The iron slipped and almost burned the soldering iron’s cable.

A friend suggested I try this family owned electronics store in town, and without any other option, other than to admit abject failure, I decided to give it a go.

The owner took the drive off me and disappeared. I could smell the sound of something burning as I waited a little nervously. In less than 2 minutes he returned with the capacitor safely soldered in place.

From that moment on it became patently clear that, no matter what I might like to imagine, there are people out there whose skills exceed mine by far.

Anyway, do DACs all sound the same, does Bluetooth 5.1 sound any better than Bluetooth 5.0 or even 4.2?

When it comes to audio and all of its myriad facets (imagery, bandwidth, dynamics, distortion, transients, coherence, timbre etc) can we ever sort out evidence from opinion?

Questions, questions...too many questions.

On second thoughts, just give me some meaningful data.