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

"All DAC chips sound the same. Am I being mislead? "

Jack, you are only being misled if you believe the nonsense spouted on ASR. This site is a bundle of laughs.

Dacs certainly do sound different.

Yesterday yet again one of the ASR minions stated that there is no difference in Dacs. I purchased a new Dac some weeks ago. Prior to this I listened to about 8 different Dacs to make up my mind. Interestingly the Dacs that rated very highly in the master minion's tests appealed the least.
I listen to a lot of opera and have gone to many many live performances. Topping made the female voice sound shrill in the mid range. It was quite unpleasant after a while and not remotely lke a live performance. I would suggest you listen to a recording such as Richard Strauss, Die Vier Letzten Lieder, Jessye Norman, , Kurt Masur, Gewandhaus Orchestra. In my opinion this is an excellent recording to compare the nuances of the female voice.
The minions at ASR state that R2R Dacs are distorted. Well I guess then live performances are also distorted. They probably only listen to heavy metal. They really disparage R2R dacs, preferring Delta Sigma. If you want to purchase a delta Sigma, at least get one with an AKM chip if you can. This is superior to Ess in my opinion.

Agree with most of Hansen's post. However point 4 is not correct:

") The DAC chip - almost everything these days is delta sigma with a built-in digital filter. Differences between different chips is one of the less important aspects of D/A converter designs. Both ESS and AKM have some special tricks to reduce out-of-band noise, which can be helpful, but not dramatic.".

Firstly, there are still many R2R Dacs that are manufactured. Secondly a number of high end manufacturers do not rely on off the counter chips but make their own. Thirdly manufacturers using ESS chips tweak the chip so that it sounds differently. Personally I do not really like Ess chips, preferring AKM or Burr Brown. Ess to me often, but not always, sounds shrill in the mid range and is hard to listen to after a while. This is what the minion leader on another site in particular, finds difficult to understand.

As I was curious I did quite a bit of research and reading over the past few days. There is some very interesting information to be found that really shows that particular site and its minion leader should be ignored.