What the Best Dac have you heard or owned. How could you tell it was that good.

At this time I own a Berkeley Alpha Reference 2 MQA, Tubadour IV, Black Ice Glass FX Tube DAC, and a Marantz KI Ruby SACD player. Prior to that I have owned a PSA PerfectWave MK II, and a Resolution Audio Quantum.

I'm afraid that this won't be a very satisfactory answer but I can't really say that one DAC is clearly superior to another. You would think that the Berkeley Reference 2 ($20,000) would blow away the Black Ice ($800) but I've compared them several times and to my ears the differences are pretty small. I could easily live with the Black Ice and be happy. The Tubadour IV is very similar to the other two but there is something about the sound that I find relaxing.

To help put this in perspective, I can't hear the difference between interconnects either. I've tried numerous times and I even bought a pair of silver cables from Audioquest because so many people said they had a distinctive sound. I compared them using a control (two very similar sounding DACs) and I could not hear any difference at all between the silver cables and Blue Jeans cables.

People who report dramatic differences in DACs must have way better hearing, or have a much more resolving system than I do.

I have a Ladder Schumann r2r ladder dac I’m very fond of. It has a beautiful wide and deep soundstage, detailed yet never edgy. I bought it used and to me, best bargain in my system.

When I went to upgrade my dac I listened and demoed in my system as much as I could. After narrowing it down to the MSB Reference with separate power supply and the Nagra Tube Dac with separate power supply I ended up purchasing the Nagra. If your budget allows, I highly recommend a unit with a separate power supply.  You will notice a much cleaner sound with more quiet background in my opinion. Love them both but felt like the Nagra did a much better job of making the music uncolored and sounding like the actual instruments are in my room.

Lampizator Baltic V4 is the best DAC I've had in my system for most vocal or acoustic music, for electronica/ambient and often (not always) large scale symphonic music, the DAC in the Lumin P1 is my preference. Among budget DACs I really like the Weiss DAC204, it's got me thinking the Weiss Helios might really be end game for me.

Do a search for AG member, jjss49. Look at his thread "dacs that I have had in my system - a listing".

I am unable to attach the link at this time 

Might be a bit deeper. A tube DAC took me a step.

DCS is one that seemed ahead of the pack a number of years back.

Many great sounding DACs at all price points these days.  I bought a dongle for $80 that is amazing. 

I have had a Sim Moon 650D with auxiliary power supply ($18K), my current Audio Research Reference CD 9SE ($17K), Berkeley Reference Alpha 3 ($22K), dCS Lina with external clock ($20K), in my system and heard the top of the line Linn and mid-tier (I don’t remember the exact cost. Also Ayre, McIntosh, Schiit Yggdrasil, and Gungnir… and several more.

In general, these first group are all very good DACs and not including the Sim, the differences are very small (since this was ten years old now, hopefully there is a big improvement with their contemporary offering.. it wasn’t very good). The Audio Research wins for me. It is ever so slightly more musical and natural. In a real head to head the Berkeley (which I fully expected to be coughing up the extra $5K for, I liked the ARC better). The difference is very very very small… tiny more detail in the Berkeley. There are real small differences in presentation. If I had to rank them on a scale of 1 - 10 the difference would be between 9, 9.5 and 10… at most. I would say this is true for most DACs over $7K or $8K.

Now streamers make a much bigger difference in general. I think DACs get really good more quickly as you invest more ( up to $5K - $7K). Streamers have a much steeper improvement. So once you have a good DAC say over $5K mating it with a Aurender N100, N200, N20, W20SE each brings really big, non-subtitle differences. This is a generalization… you have to go with the spirt of it. Not taking a Yggdrasil and mating it with a W20SE. If you’re in the high end of the streamer line up, you are going to need to mate it with a better DAC than a $5K one to get everything out of the streamer, but the magnitude of the DAC improvements will be smaller.

@painter24 20th year in the hobby. Infigo method 4 DAC. I’m done. Does everything I want it to. Went from a solution 540. I have owned 5 or 6 in my life. I’m truly done. We were part of a shootout on Whatsbestforum. Went up against the best of the best and held its own.  I’m happy. 

Owned: Areas 12th-1 so far; this has kept my Cen Grand DSDAC 1.0 Super Clock off my rack for 6 weeks, and I don't feel like I'll be changing this anytime soon. The Cen Grand is 3x the cost of the Ares, but it doesn't come close to sheer enjoyment compared the the Ares. This is of course my subjective observation in my system, my room, my humble ears.

For £1k+, the Ares12th-1 is a monster