Thinking about getting a R2R DAC

Well, OP, I just went from chord qutest to holo audio may (r2r). It’s a non oversampling dac, although it does oversample too if you want that. Wow, what an upgrade! Slightly less crisp, but warm, smooth, natural, wonderful deep rich soundstage. There's more "air" in the music now, as herb reichert talked about in stereophile. The 2 DACs are not equally priced, so it’s not entirely fair, but I am thrilled with the change. The r2r part is key, but power supply, clocking, and quality of output stage all contribute. Go NOS r2r and don’t look back.

@parker65310

just a point of clarification re your posted comments on the bs node 2 unfolding mqa... if feeding an outboard dac, the streamer function in the node will only do 1 of the 3 total ’unfolds’ for full mqa rendering, an mqa-capable dac would need to do the 2 remaining steps for full mqa rendering... this being said, many believe (and i concur based on my own listening) that you get a lion’s share of the sq benefit of mqa with the first unfold (to 96k), remaining two unfolds adds a touch more ’air,’ but rather minimal difference i can hear

@hilde45

haha well i am still kinda old school when it comes to note taking, so i have a spiral notebook and handwritten jottings on each - it has been fun... since the covid shut in in february i finally stopped procrastinating and dove head first into streaming... the SQ was so impressive and beyond my expectations that i decided to go whole hog and run through any and all of the leading suspects to build my ideal streaming front end, to go along with the cdp and turntable

@snatex

jolida tube dac is a good one... for the money it is a real steal... it does not have quite the ease of presentation of the better ones but it images big, wide and deep, has a sweet luscious midrange, but with a little more sizzle up top than you would expect in a tube output dac - i have tried to tube roll some but it is still more in the clear and punchy school compared to most the others - this may be due its being based on a DS dac chip, or may just be the output stage implementation

i am not a headphone guy so much so i cannot comment much on the sq of the headphone jack on it, but for the money it is pretty feature laden, with headphone out and volume control for outputs

finally on your wanting summary blurbs, my evaluations are still a work in process... one day i may try to collectively summarize ... the caveat of course is it is only my system, my tastes, my network - if you or others have specific questions i will share my thoughts if my experience is relevant - i do have firm reasons for selling off the ones i decided to move on from, those i can speak to more definitively

@jjss49 

How would you rank the Black Ice, Qutest (w/o MScaler), Codex and Orchid? Any others under $2k with a small footprint that stand out? 

Hey Dannad: you never answered my questions. What is YOUR DAC?

Also, the other question you did not answer: why did you have to switch your Audiogon handles from AtDavid first, then Roberttid, now Dannad? Why did they ban you? Twice!