When Will the DAC Singularity Be Reached?

Great DACs will always cost more, just like great amps and preamps.

The actual digital to analog conversion of which so much is made is probably the least important component of a DAC.  Great DACs have been made with every type of conversion be they DS chips, R2R chips or discrete, and FGPA chips, which are chips individually programmed, usually partly DS.

Where the expense comes in is in great power supplies and the analog output stages that include I-V conversion, low-pass filters, gain stage and output buffers.   What can easily add up to $5-6000 for a preamp can do the same for a DAC, if you want the very best.

Then there are the things unique to DACs like expensive Xtal clocks and the necessity to totally isolate digital and analog components.

The designer of the DAC I use has written that any competent electrical engineer can make a relatively cheap DAC that will score high with conventional measurements.  But it probably won't sound very good.  There are lots of such DACs around and they sell because people believe their eyes rather than their ears.

Finally I would add that very many DAC purchasers (and many who call themselves critics--and that's easy to do these days because all you need is an iPhone) have never heard music except through loudspeakers.  So they are all too easily satisfied.

It seems I was grossly misunderstood by @othercrazycanuck in a very audiophile way.  Likely I did not express it well.

Revealing or not, I don't advocate listening through earphones to recordings that are engineered to sound like real musical events through loudspeakers.  It creates a surreal experience, not a naturally sounding one.

What I meant, though, is that audiophiles and critics whose experience with musical instruments is almost exclusively through loudspeakers, rather than with unamplified real instruments, are relatively more easily satisfied with cheap components.

I believe that DAC singularity point has been reached already.

I believe this not because i had much experience with high end dac or dac in general...

i believe it because i listen classical music and non amplified music and the timbre experience, the holographic 3_d soundfield i experience now with a low cost dac prove to me that Dac technology is mature... i dont partake ASR opinions about Dac... but they are not completely wrong either about dac... Amplifier is another matter...

I agree with @mahgister, including on his standard of comparison.  Within the last 5 years the DAC industry seems to have fully matured so that digital is fully competitive with any other medium.  It has taken over 40 years for this to happen. There are no trade secrets that would keep a great DAC from being made anywhere.   In an analogous😀 way, analog reproduction has continued to progress well after its media production has basically ceased.

There is, though, a caveat that should be applied to this discussion.  It is the the seeming equivalence made between price and quality.  There are great values in some truly great DACs.  IMO that is principally, but not exclusively, in DACs that are made in China.  My own Chinese DAC has been called, by someone in the industry in Europa, a $10M DAC for $3M.  I'm not here to sell any DACs and there are other Chinese DACs about which the same sort of claim can be made when comparing quality of internal parts and quality of manufacture to DACs coming from the US and Europe.  China produces most of the DACs these days.  Most of them are forgettable (except to the ASR crowd).  But some are truly great.