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Will the AK4499EX successor come out in 2025?

We are kinda going off the topic, but I gave them a list of DACs I wanted to hear and told them to mix them up in any order for me to hear it, I just took some notes on each dac after listening to it. I was quite excited to try the R2R dacs like the Topping Centaurus and the Topping D90 discrete
So level matching then?
 
Lol. Yes I am sure it doesn't hit your high and mighty standards.
It’s not a high standard. Proper level matching is the bare minimum that is needed for such tests. This has been proven time and time again: level differences trump any other audible differences in these devices by a wide margin.
 
Lol. Yes I am sure it doesn't hit your high and mighty standards.
It is the very-fallible human perceptions that get fooled with minute level mis-matches - even in the .5dB range. There is nothing "wrong" with your method of auditioning DAC's - it just wasn't level matched for the best chance of being totally valid w/o a subconscious volume bias (louder is almost always experienced as being better - even if you think {are told} the levels are identical).
 
Not really high and mighty .

We have this tread where all DAC's sound diffrent fud eventually ends up :)


tldr .

Of course a really badly designed DAC can potentially sound different .

But if you in any experiment managed to get two reasonable well designed DAC's to sound different . You made an experimental error it's a simple as that .
They do not sound different . its like being "the one" in the matrix if you actually heard differences, not very likely .

Main obstacles , sighted not double blind, not close enough level match ( use volt meter not spl meter acoustically ) and picked different filters , for some reason both ESS and AKM provides some filters that's not transparent and does not fulfill the requirements of the sample theorem.
 
I think your OP question is fair, and there is no need to justify asking the question.
It’s not about justifying the question. Anyone can ask almost anything they like. This is about understanding the context of the question. Meanwhile, the real question was the very first sentence of the OP:
I was wondering if now is a good time to invest in a high end AK dac,
And this is what most sensible answers focuses on and rightfully concluded that it’s basically never a good time to invest in a high-end DAC, because it’s been a solved problem for decades. So this:
We are kinda going off the topic,
Isn’t off-topic at all. Because the belief that DACs sound different is the whole reason why the question came up in the first place.
 
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