You haven’t lived until you paid $6k for a tube amp and hear your friends dump on the tube noise.

All seriousness, I’m happy listening on any >$50 DAC, but in all cases prefer my nicer one.

I bought a ladder dac and will never go back, more detail, more power, smoother sound. I went with the Holo Audio Spring 2 level 2.

It’s hardly a matter of belief: we’re pretty sure of what the limits of human hearing are (and that can easily be tested) so if two devices are performing well above what we’d be able to discern in their performance you won’t notice a difference.

If this was not the case it would be in the best interest of any of the manufacturers of expensive equipment to setup a credible A/B test that would show how a difference can actually be discerned. But they won’t, because it can’t.

Same amp with multiple DACs connected at the same time, volume matched. Just switch the source and can easily tell differences. Maybe a 1 second gap in doing so. Focus on specific aspects of sound like perhaps a guitar you hear at extremes of left and right. Evaluating 2 R2R DACs that way the lesser one almost eliminated the guitar and what there was of it was in the center. With other comparisons there can be big differences in clarity or even hearing portions of music suddenly gone. Generally a skeptic with a science background so well aware of placebo effects and such. The differences I’ve heard in DACs have ranged from minor to significant. Makes me wonder how others can’t hear these obvious differences. Though if it was 30 seconds or more between switching sources I wouldn’t trust my auditory memory.

DACs, no. DAC/AMP combos however, only slight differences. When I had a Hugo 2 I blind tested it with my PC audio out into some focal utopias and the only difference was a very VERY small hiss from the pc and that was it.

I’ve heard a few 3000+ dacs and can’t tell the difference between my humble su8 v2 side by side with the same headphones and amp.

If you hear some flaw and you can tell it’s the DAC and not the amp or elsewhere, then that would have to be an absolutely shitty DAC

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time I designed my own DAC. PCM1704 with ultra low jitter crystals and state of the art low noise linear regulation. It used a discrete floating JFET IV stage using now discontinued but much lauded transistors. It was battery powered so there could be no power line noise.

It was. Joy. Such a fantastically wide soundstage. Highly detailed. Great dynamics. A magnificent experience. Like nothing I had ever experienced.

Then I realized that the RCAs going to my amp were still plugged into my soundcard and the ones coming out of the DAC were just dangling.

I’ll say with complete honesty that the DAC changed my life, just not with its audio quality.

They were designed to be transparent when I started in the 90s and they’re designed to be transparent today. They just got better at making them audibly invisible as intended and cheaper to make between now and then. As long as companies continue to sit down on day one of creating a DAC with the first order of business making it inaudible, I’ll continue to evaluate and purchase them based on their ability to fulfill their intended purpose - Which costs about $8 in 2023.

I’m thankful people buy them so companies have extra revenue to keep gear that actually matters cheaper. They’ve managed turn a redundant and obsolete product category into an audio requirement thanks to people selling DACs and other audio jewelry for them through confirmation bias on the forums and assorted internet mediums. Companies were able to eliminate huge portions of their advertising and marketing budgets when customers started selling gear for them by telling anyone who would listen about how great what they just bought sounds regardless if it was possible for it to do it or not. They didn’t have to pour any snake oil on it, the communities did it for them. Not only did they sell gear for them, they made it into literal tribal warfare defending the products against criticism and objective data on their behalf. Unpaid labor is pretty sweet, you can sell a lot of things a lot cheaper with that kind of workforce and customer base.

That all contributed to what we have modern day, which is an era where what was unobtainable audio gear and levels of quality are now affordable for just about anybody. ASR came about and altered the market to make measurement standards for even entry level gear and anyone who knew how to interpret them and research how sound and audio equipment actually worked reaped the benefits people who didn’t paid for.

These days I just try to help new people save money entering the hobby by providing information so they can become informed consumers and count my lucky stars people who opt not to be still buy this stuff for higher and higher prices the cheaper it gets to make them. Audio used to be a really expensive hobby, now it’s pretty much just natural selection.

If it doesn’t then it isn’t a proper DAC.

Of course different DACs can sound different. But if you’re limiting your experience to, for instance, just comparing one AKM DAC versus another AKM DAC, then no, there’s no humanly perceptible difference to be perceived.

There’s a whole heap of people out there that need to remember that “I can’t hear a difference” =/= “No one can hear a difference”

For me, the way I am about audio is opposite to the way I am about, say, coffee. To me, all coffee tastes the same. It obviously doesn’t really, there are millions of coffee enthusiasts in the world that are dedicated to training their palates to discern between all sorts of qualities and characteristics of different coffees. Me, though? Pft, I don’t care enough, I just want the hot bean water that makes me buzzy in the morning. I’ve made no attempt to learn how to discern between different coffees, so they all taste the same to me. But clearly that’s a Me issue, not an Everyone Else issue. “I can’t taste a difference” =/= “No one can taste a difference”

And maybe this all stems from unreasonable expectations. There seems to be this idea that going from one audio chain to another can be like, say, spending your whole life seeing in black and white and then flipping a switch and suddenly seeing in full, vibrant color for the first time. Because honestly, that is the kind of hyperbole that enthusiasts commonly use to describe the difference. They use fun language because they’re having fun with their hobby. But in a literal sense, it’s just not like that at all. It’s much more subtle, and being able to detect these things takes experience and training, and some people have an easier time than others acquiring this experience and training. Some people are very enthusiastic about learning how to hear the subtle differences, they enjoy the ear training process. Other people just don’t care enough and they just want to listen to music. Similarly, there are coffee people that can take one sip and tell you where the beans came from, and there are other people that don’t care and just want the caffeine delivery. The enthusiastic hobbyists and the casual enjoyers. And both of those kinds of people are 100% fine. There’s nothing wrong with being either kind of person. But it’s the kind of person that insists everyone else is stupid for enjoying something differently than they do, that’s the boring, agonizing kind of person you never want to be. Don’t be that kind of person. For the love of god, just let people enjoy things.

Yes. But some real garbage ones have tons of clickity pops and static.

Honestly, most non tube AMPS sound the same, let alone DACs. But then you would have to admit that most adults can only hear up to 16kHz, most of the music content you listen to is in the under 10kHz range, SINAD is way past human hearing, vinyl is often transcribed from digital recordings, microphones are often digital these days so no analog version of sound even exists, and a myriad of other uncomfortable truths that audiophiles don’t like.

Above a very low threshold level, the sound quality(type reproduction, lack of distortion, actually reproducing the source, etc.) is pretty much the same, yes.

But what you do get is either a) a dac set up in such a way that the expensive components (also on the dac, with soldering and chipset pieces) don’t really matter (wiring, plugs, etc), or b) tuning and noise-filter passes that insert a signature to the sound that you can absolutely hear (this also happens in mixing targets, which makes this difficult).

In either case, you can hear a difference for sure. But it is not typically the case that you can discern which one is “quality” and which one is just different tuning. I.e., you might like one over another, and that difference might be worth something to you. But writing it up as a quality-difference is not often a good idea. This has been the case for a while now.

And… then you arrive at a point where what would cost a fortune 20 years ago (in a very expensive amplifier) can be found in a usb-powered 2x2cm block - and this low threshold level you need to get past to not really be able to hear the difference in quality has truly become extremely low. To the point where expensive dacs might actually be of the a) kind, introducing chipset pieces and soldering that might not be that great. Or the b) kind that tweaks the output - and since the chi-fi option often just lacks the amounts of components and layers to have those mechanical issues, and also lacks “signature” styles and filters, they just are… dare I say it, objectively better. Because I prefer a less filtered setup if possible (if that doesn’t cause issues - which it might). And I know many others (including people I’ve tricked to like something they would normally have burned with fire and spat on) who also prefer this over massively more expensive setups.

So I think that in that world, even dacs that are 16bit/44,1khz, don’t really expose themselves as insufficient (given that that is the source and the target format). But dacs still do sound different, for absolutely certain. And if you target higher bitrate formats, then there are differences in the strategy used to do that that might be interesting depending on what you want to put that signal to.

For me, I think the moment I realized this was maybe a bit of a problem, was when I was led around to listen to a Hegel setup once. I wasn’t going to buy something like that, being a sound-peasant - but the shop was empty, and I led the guy on a bit on a journey through sound-technical things and formats and so on. And we ended up trying this setup on different sources, on different inputs, and so on. CD, digital input box from Hegel’s stuff. And some random other box, an hdmi source, and a few more sources around the store. I had different lossless and compressed formats to try(from higher sampled sources), and they had demonstration tapes and their own things, so this was interesting to both of us. And I offered as a joke to try using my phone (which had a - I realized eventually, a nice in-built dac) through usb and jack. And we tried that as well.

And I realized that all of these sources basically gave the same sound output. I could put the bitrate and the sample rate higher and lower, and I just couldn’t hear it on that setup. I could notice the analog sources were different from the hdmi-source and the other streaming source, but it wasn’t because of the sound quality change, but from different filtering and tuning (on that stage, on their dac). Some higher bitrate sources (which were mixed to a higher bitrate target) genuinely didn’t come out (except as the classic softening you experience in cheap hifi-setups when the density of the source is too high, or the peaks are moved slightly - that I recognise now as filters and tuning - that now messed with the balance of the mix, highlighting weird stuff that shouldn’t be). Sure, the Pink Floyd tracks were good from the high quality stream, but they were also fine on the audio jack on my phone(…presumably now bypassing a comically expensive Hegel Dac and using my crappy phone dac instead, and really adding terrible noise from a very cheap jack… right…?), including when I turned down the bitrate of the source. Wtf. I didn’t believe it, so I had to double-check - is there a problem with the output, is the amplifier involved, is the bitstreaming not working, etc. Surely there had to be some difference, right? It’s this brand! It costs a fortune, it has to be magically good!

But that’s just how that sound-system was set up, with a couple of stages of careful conversion for the analog inputs intended for noisy sources, and a different layer of filters for the hdmi and other digital inputs. That then was in the end reproduced out at about the same signature, presumably tuned in some way that they would like the speakers to be favoured by (they were not). In 1990, this would have given you a very solid output on a bunch of different sources, of course. And the tuning also clearly favoured the demonstration samples that were higher bitrate formats (but not sampled at higher than their dac… >_<). All the pieces here were competent hardware as well. But because of the way it was designed and put together at the inputs, it basically cut off anything past cd-quality - even if you played from a higher bitrate source. I.e., if you put a random 16bit/44,1Khz dac on the input to this(or something sufficiently high quality enough to not cause distortion, basically… like… no standard whatsoever), it really wouldn’t make any difference to what came out, basically regardless of the source quality. It’d be pretty much the same, quality-wise.

And this is a surround-system that cost more than a new car, right? The difference, in the end, between slightly muted and slightly harsher kitchen-player sound: many, many, many moneys.

It just completely changed the way I thought about hifi-sound in general. In the sense that if you are playing back a digitally sampled track mixed to a relatively low bitrate format, there is no /reproduction quality/ difference between something for infinite amounts of moneys and something for very few moneys. Where the difference comes in is when you are able to effortlessly hear all the details in the music at a low volume on a setup - you can pay a great deal before you achieve that (but it’s also not necessary if you have a digital source, converted properly, and then amplified to the target speakers competently well). And to then play very loud without inserting artefacts or uncomfortable parts of the spectrums and so on, that is also something you might conceivably pay a lot of money to achieve.

But most people pay for that “signature” that literally has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the sound reproduction. Worse, a lot of what is supposed to be really high quality stuff doesn’t necessarily favour higher sample sources anyway.

Meanwhile - what is interesting is the maths behind a dac that adjusts towards the resistance of the target automatically (as a pre-amp - ease of use, no need to be a sound-engineer to get things to work). And using several layers and then splice the waveforms later, to be able to convert at a very low effect without creating noise. That sort of thing is interesting, specially for mobile and portable targets (or in a sense also professional mixing stages, because “good enough” is ok to get if you can get it instantly).

But beyond that? No. No difference.

I think I can hear a subtle difference between my Fiio and the Tempotec Sonata, but it’s not significant and not worth worrying about.