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

@jjss49 

+1

Myself and all the audiophiles I know try to work on increasing our investment in electronics, placing speakers, placing equipment, implementing tweaks, and room treatments to get the best possible sound. This is the basic passion of an audiophile. 

@laoman 

+1 !

I am afraid Audio Science Review is a completely useless site for any useful information on actual sound quality. Having been an audiophile and a scientist over the last fifty years. Amir or what ever his name is… is a guy obsessesed with measurements and is completely clueless about musical reproduction of sound. I can appreciate his interest in measurement… but the relationship to sound quality is virtually non-existent.

I have owned DACs costing in the hundreds of dollars, $2K, $5K, $10K, $17K and $22K. I assure you theyor sound is far more correlated to price than his measurements. This is because companies that produce good DACs start by using parameters…. Then they listen to then, to make them sound good.

Stuff that measures flat tends to sound terrible. Audio Science Review is really good at producing pretty charts. After put together a fantastic sounding system… go back and see what his charts look like for your equipment… oh, that is right, you will not find any… it’s all budget stuff.

The thing about increasingly expensive DACs in a really good system is that small differences are increasingly significant in the sound presentation. I have the most pleasing DAC I have heard in my system (the Audio Research Reference CD9SE).. before that a Sim Audio 650D (now replaced by the newer and better sounding 750) and a Berkeley Reference Alpha 3 ($17K, $18K, and $22K). Each were excellent and sounded far better than notably less expensive ones. Each worthy of their cost because of their sound quality. 

@asctim

I would refine what you said a little. Designers start with solid design that produce great sound with in high level requirements (watts per channel, gain… etc.). Then they will swap sub components like capacitors, resisters, special placement… etc to make it sound great… often the end product will sound much better… but not test as well. It doesn’t take anywhere the engineering time to create a component that just tests well as one that sounds great. Hence higher cost. Also why choosing equipment by specs will seldom sound good. So, the “secret sauce” is upgrading sub components and listening over and over and over during the design process and using much higher quality components.

Each major high end audio company has a house sound.. B&W, ARC, Sonus Faber, Conrad Johnson, Wilson, etc. They know what they are trying to achieve.

I read an interview with the head designer at MBL (?), Burmeister (?). Anyway, one of the most highly respected high end audio company. He talked about how he approached design and that he could achieve what ever sound he wanted. He knows that brand x capacitors sound like this… and brand y sounds like that… so he can make the equipment sound like anyway he likes. Their high end (very high end) was designed to be an assault on what is possible… but that there was a limited market for that sound. So he just completed a design for folks with less refined tastes, for a lower level markets (not remotely cheap).

Additionally these are trade secrets. A company / design engineer that understands the characteristics of different components within different design has proprietary knowledge. This is the stuff of competive advantage. Over time it becomes widely known in the community, the company moves on, to say, using cryogenic treated wire… or machined solid blocks of unobtainium for the case.

Design engineers capable of that level of sound quality engineering are exceedingly rare. I have had the pleasure of managing and working with truly incredible minds… literally geniuses. Those that make smart people look stupid. These are the kind of people capable of creating leading edge designs. Companies that produce really high end equipment are not unaware or stumbling around. They don’t play with blind tests any more than the top birders in the world need to refer to google to make sure of the correct identification of a sparrow.

@cd45123 

It is highly dependent on your system. The better the system (in general) the more profound the difference.