TheMiddleSky
Headphoneus Supremus
While I agree DAC technology is so fast nowadays, it only implies to Delta Sigma chip based DAC. I think because the chip companies push their product so fast as well (AKM, Sabre, Cirrus Logic, etc).I’m not implying the Topping is better than the Dave, just saying that in the DAC world, things move quickly and a state of the art DAC from a few years ago may soon become hopelessly obsolete (e.g., see what happens in the home theater world when 10 grand receivers become worthless because they don’t resolve Dolby Pro Blah Blah or Atmos Super Duper).
While in high end digital converters, most of them don't use these Delta Sigma chips (Dave with its Pulse Array DAC), therefore the progress is slower, and something like Chord Dave or DCS DAC may last for at least 5 years before the company succeed bring something better to the market.
Delta Sigma DAC indeed has fast progress, as we can see "cheap" DACs nowadays sound much much better compared to few years ago (Imagine what small dongle dac able to do nowadays). However, I think they have their own limitation or "hard to exploit" when being compared to other type of DACs, as most of them can not reach the summit fi market (of course not all of them).
No, I don't totally relate ASR measurement with sound quality by what human listen in real life. At some point the measurement simply tell nothing about what we about to experience about a DAC. Have capabilities to playback DSD512 or DSD1024 great for marketing brochure, but people who really use it is extremely low in number, even in niche audiophile market.
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