Differences in DAC's...

[daftcombo]

Nonetheless, I believe it was audible to my aging ears. The subjective reviewer is 20 or 30 years younger than I am.

Disclaimer: I did not ABX since my portion of the review focused on measurement, not the sound.

I believe you can hear a difference, especially in an ABX, but to use the word "dull" seems extreme to me.
Did you use special audiophile recordings maybe?

 

[SIY]

I believe you can hear a difference, especially in an ABX, but to use the word "dull" seems extreme to me.
Did you use special audiophile recordings maybe?

I don't know what Bennett used; I almost never use "audiophile" recordings. Mostly my own recordings, along with some commercial ones done similarly with very little signal processing, and assortments from Mapleshade and Delos.

 

[gvl]

My take on boutique NOS R2R is that their "naturalness" and "body" have nothing to do with the lack of digital filters despite what the manufacturers are trying to sell you, but simply is a result of high THD. The lack of digital filters is responsible for the HF droop and dirty treble. I had enough time to play with Metrum DACs, when oversampling externally with HQ Player the high frequencies are cleaned up a good deal while "naturalness" and "body" remain..

 

[Shadrach]

It seems you're confused both about interpolation/extrapolation as well as how to read a log graph. You can easily figure out the value for anything below 20kHz on this graph, which is the farthest right grey line. For example, to figure out where 15kHz lies, you can calculate (log(15000)-log(10000))/(log(20000-log(10000)) which gives you 0.585, so you know 15kHz is 58.5% of the way between the 10kHz and 20kHz line (which gives you something like -1.6dBs). Another example, 13kHz is 37.9% of the way from 10kHz to 20kHz on the log graph, so it is around -1.3dB. This isn't interpolation or extrapolation, it's just reading the graph at known points. (technically, you're interpolating the point at which you're reading the graph from, but you're not interpolating/extrapolating the value on the graph).
As for not knowing enough about DACs to read a graph... well...

Very good!
I obviously didn't do very good job explaining my point in my initial post.
You're the first person here to go on my ignore list. Congratulations.