I know that my comment will fall on tone deaf ears but I find all of these arguments self serving and gibberish. I became an “audiophile” in 1966 when in Vietnam and bought Sony reel to reel with both detachable lid and sidemounted speakers. Wow. It beat the hell out my portable radio. Peter, Paul and Mary were awesome and Uncle Bob couldn’t sing a lick but wrote great stuff, somebody in our basecamp had a similar tape recorder but added some Pioneer full range speakers. Off to the PX and massive improvement till someone added receiver for more power. Holy Mackerel. I had to get me one of those. So I did. I rotated back to the states before getting a turntable but the scarcity of prerecorded tapes made a Gerrard necessary.I upgraded for more power, auto reverse and turntable vs changers, but the constant was ANALOG. I hated clicks and pops and tape hiss but the music was not an issue. It was great. Now I have pay thousands of dollars to try to recapture the analog era that we lost to bandwidth. Tape deck $200. Pioneer speakers $115 each. Sansui receiver $125. Gerrard changer $119. Less than $700 for a mid quality analog system that my fellow soldiers coveted. How much is a good DAC? No wonder 50 year old stuff is so popular!
When Will the DAC Singularity Be Reached?
A humorous title, but wondering if those more in the know have an opinion on either: i) examples today where inexpensive DACs (say under $2500) are comparable or superior to expensive (say over $10K) DACs or ii) can we anticipate that within a relatively few number of years that inexpensive DACs will basically achieve the sound quality of today's expensive DACs? Thanks.