watchnerd
Grand Contributor
With DACs it's mainly about implementation - IME the highest effective quality is only reached in this part of the chain when every last engineering aspect of the component is carefully addressed - doing engineering by the numbers will yield Yet Another DAC, in terms of the SQ - everything seems to be in place, but the perceived quality never hits a high point. An extreme example of how this operates is a CD player by the Swiss CH Precision company, which I heard in the flesh. It got the sound 'right', as compared as plenty of others which failed - extremely expensive, but it uses the same D/A chip as a cheap media player.
But why do you think this particular DAC sounds "right"?
Just because a reviewer, with all the usual conflicts of interest, on a 3rd tier publication, said he liked it?