"The earliest non-oversampling CD players were R2R and critics called them bright, shrill, gritty, glassy, shouty,"
You mean the earliest Japanese NON-oversampling DACs? Perhaps it is a fair accusation. But the early Philips (TDA1540) and its TDA1541 successor certainly could not be accused of such traits. If anything, they sounded a bit rounded and veiled in comparison. But even those Japanese R2R DACs had come along way only half a decade later, and they sounded on the whole quite respectable. Technology has come a long way since, and as evidenced by this review, R2R implementations are arguably the best they have ever been...