Digital Improving All the Time?


I hear it here all the time - digital technology is constantly improving…usually being told to someone afraid of buying something that will be obsolete soon. It is true that, with the advent of high-quality Asian products, prices on some excellent digital has come down to the point that one can buy a very nice dac for under 1k and an excellent one for 5k. But I don’t see that the technologies improved over the last 20 years. The Naim 555 and the Vekian and Wadias were astounding products built long ago. Even now, some of the best dacs from Audio Note and Jadis use old chips and the darling ladder dacs are even older technology. Ok, some use the FPGA thing, but that’s basically just a home-rolled chip, which does add a bit more flexibility to the architecture, but that’s about it, IMO. And yes, some companies like DCS and MSB built $100k dacs that I’m sure sound great, but other companies probably could have done the same thing 20 years ago by adding huge power supplies and stuffing them with the most expensive parts and construction quality possible. But they probably didn’t think anyone would buy them. And I’m not talking about streaming and such, because that is relatively young in its development. Streamers may well be improving, but I don’t see dacs as constantly improving, as is so often said. Good day.

chayro

@chayro , I have an elaborate 9.2.7 immersive home theater AND a simplified two channel desktop system. The two channel system is simply a pair of Paradigm Shift A2 active speakers and a Paradigm PW Link streamer/preamp with ARC room correction. For two channel I love the "simplify" or "futurfi" approach.

 

I think better clocks and elimination of jitter has certainly improved over that time.  Also, the latest ladder DACs seem to be a notable advancement as well.  But, and to your point, some of the better DACs today employ older chips to achieve their sonic objectives so some is old and some is new.  

So, let’s say you have $2k to spend on a DAC. For SQ only, is it better to buy the latest and greatest new, or nearly new, OR buy something 5-10 years old that was originally $5-8k new?

This gets to the question of this thread—how much are DACs really evolving for the better?

@w123ale , I like this "big picture" on dacs by Thomas, he talks about "good enough" vs chasing incremental improvements. Check out the "high end" of the old days vs. "affordable" today:.:

 

DAC chipsets I think have hit the wall. Now improvement is coming in different segments of the chain, isolation, reduction of jitter, emi, rfi,. This is what the high dollar DACs do better than the lower end gear.