Burr-Brown based DAC measurements

[Veri]

you can get absolutely ****** results with top tier AKM/ESS chip if it was badly implemented and get better performance from low tier chip is the arch is better.

Well you can bet that "shit implementations" will have piss poor SNR so yes, measurements which show such nasty things. And for many people ~16 bit transparency at 96dB is totally fine, not disagreeing there. Components' distortion will accumulate though so if every device has some signal-to-noise distortion headroom it can't hurt.. right?

If your DAC has 90dB SINAD and your amp has 89 dB SINAD and maybe you have some pre amp in between somewhere I can tell you won't reach full CD transparency. You must end up with some grungy or less than stellar end-result fidelity. Or it might be fine. Our thresholds are actually quite high, yes.