NOS DAC's without any digital filtering?

I find its getting harder to find a bad sounding DAC these days. At Walmart maybe. The sound from those in even decent quality commercial devices, like those from Apple, is so much better than what was around in years past. I find the differences exist but its getting harder and harder to tell, which is a good thing. Digital technology continues to progress at light speed it seems. The other factors that make for good sound like transducer quality and matching amplification seem to practically be much bigger considerations for getting good quality sound these days, whereas in the past, source device quality was often the bottleneck.

"09-24-15: Coli
And yes, Zd542, the Directstream sounded horrible. The market price for it just keeps going to down reflects that. $2950 and no buyers. "

I never asked about the Directstream. A lot of other posters have asked you questions. Why not answer them?

Okay, that makes complete sense now. Thanks!

So even with a NOS DAC I assume there is still benefit of using hi-res files? Why would somebody want to up-sample redbook in their software (foobar, JRMC, Amarra, etc.)? I haven't tried this in a few years but I recall that I preferred the sound w/o the upsampling (in JRMC).

Hmmm.

I don't see any questions directed at me in this thread?

You generally won't be able to tell how much modern DAC sucks until you got a really high end accurate system. That means super high damping (making integrating the amp into the speaker mandatory), plus you'll need balanced power (to reduce noise by 10-20db, a miracle btw), you'll also need low jitter input, but that still leaves a huge weak spot the analog XLR cable, so you'll need a very good one there too.

So if your current DAC sounds fine, don't upgrade your gears :)