Thanks, everyone, for an excellent discussion. The question arises on how I shall recognize the DAC for which I am searching. I don't have a lab bench setup, but here is now I summarized my initial evaluation criteria in a recent email to some friends:
How will I know when my DAC has arrived?
When Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France” exhibits the same depth of movement, front to rear in the horizontal plane, that it used to. I shall elaborate.
In the mid ‘90’s, on our last audio buying spree, we bought a Proceed (Madrigal’s introductory product line culminating in Mark Levinson) CDD (CD transport) and matching DAP (DAC).
In recent years, I noticed the following with regard to “Tour de France” using these components:
- In the composition “Tour de France,” the electronic “echos” of the main rhythm riff flew rapidly from the foreground to the background, while swaying slowly from left to right. This gave the impression of rapid movement of some point of reference towards the listener, which is what I think was Kraftwerk’s goal, given the subject matter.
- In the composition “La Forme,” The rhythm riff which opens the composition slowly moved in a circular motion, in the horizontal plane. That is, it moves from left, to front center, to the right, to the rear center, etc. Its reverberation opposes it on the direct opposite of the circle.
At least the above is what I used to believe that I heard. These are among the reasons that I love Kraftwerk.
When the CDD and DAP were replaced with the Oppo BDP-105D several years ago, the front-to-rear depth collapsed dramatically. I no longer heard the movement of the echoes in “Tour de France” from front-to-rear echoes. And the “circle” in “La Forme” changed to a line from left-to-right.
This loss of dimension is noticeable on other recordings as well, but I can remember these Kraftwerk effects well, and I can use it as my reference.
The BDP-105d seemed to exhibit greater detail overall, but some nuance had obviously been lost. It is my theory that what is missing is ambience and is below the threshold of measurements in normal audio testing. But, Madrigal knew what they were doing. But, Madrigal is no more, and Mark-Levinson is now owned by Harmon and doesn’t make a standalone DAC.
I have closely listened to this recording on the Topping D90 closely, and I sense some depth, but the image moving through it is not well placed.
Maybe I am chasing an observation that I will never reproduce, but I think that these phenomena were unimagined, were fairly distinguishable, and were the intent of the artists, and when I hear these phenomena again, I will know that my DAC has arrived. I just hope that it is not too expensive. (The DAP was $2k in the late 90’s, I believe.)