On a side note, you suggest that more expensive gear does generally offer worthwhile improvements [if not necessarily as good a value proposition]; which is reassuring. I think!
Anoobis' post leads me to think I need to give you all a bit of my philosophy so that you understand why I'm going to put up ~$10K (mostly refundable) to test a bunch of DACs over the holidays. If you are one of those folks who thinks anything related to philosophy is BS (and you engineers know who you are), just skip this post, I'll get to the reviewing in a few weeks, and then you might be interested in reading my "stuff" again. Or not. My pay is the same either way. So here goes:
In 40 years of chasing "high-fidelity audio" I have concluded that
some more expensive gear offers worthwhile improvements --
sometimes those improvements are even significant enough to provide a good value
in my view. The trick is figuring out which hardware that is, at least to my brain via my ears. As I have often pontificated with excessive verbosity on these boards, this is all personal choice. While there are certain biological commonalities in all humans, there are enough differences in physiology and experience that what I think is a good value is not necessarily what others think is a good value. E.g., I chose to spend the extra $1K to get LCD-3s over LCD-2s. Others think that's a waste of money. They are likely correct, for their brains and their money. My brain (what little there is of it), my money (what little there is of it), my choice.
In the old days, I spent many hours in audio salons listening to all of the hardware, whether I could afford it or not. Over all of those years I established a personal scale for performance vs. price that I use to make decisions about what I want to own, and what I don't want to own. Of course sometimes I screw up anyway and make purchases I end up regretting. Life sucks that way. But I prefer screwing up on my own to just taking other people's advice and buying what's popular, or well-marketed.
Once again: there are no unbiased opinions in audio. Everybody's opinion is biased by something: the limits of the audio spectrum they can detect, how well they can process that detected signal (some people really are tone deaf), how much experience they have that allows them to match reproductions with originals, etc., etc. Professional reviewers are biased. I am biased. All of you are biased. That's a good thing: if we all received and processed audio signals from 20-20khz exactly the same, there would be no Head-fi. There would probably only be one website with fully calibrated test results, and we would all just buy the hardware able to produce the flattest frequency response within the audio spectrum, and that would be it. Of course some folks do that anyway... but I've learned over the years that the hardware with the flattest frequency response doesn't sound the best to me. My personal in-body receivers and processor are thus flawed, dooming me to spend my nights and weekends (and some days, if truth be told) seeking out that hardware whose output flaws most closely match up with my input/processing flaws to provide the most pleasing total experience -- to me.
Unfortunately, these days the number of true audio salons where I might seek such imperfect hardware to audition is down to a sparse few. So the point of this comparison test is for me to try, in my home with the rest of my system, a number of DACs, some of which are quite low cost (My Emotiva XDA-1 cost me $200) some of which are bordering on high end ($2K is a significant amount of money to most people) and the rest are in between. Marketing and fanboy claims make it hard to determine which units in this range are most likely to match my flaws and which aren't, so I'm asking the community to suggest entrants, and I'm using my best judgment to pick a representative field that will offer the best chance of finding that perfectly flawed hardware at the right price to provide me a good value, or even
great value, DAC.
Why do I even ask you folks for inputs, if our biases are probably so different? Because, of course, I'm too lazy to search every mention of every DAC on every website in the world. But I know that many of you are even more addicted to this stuff than I am, and have heard every piece of hardware out there, or have read every piece of information or marketing hype available on every website. Biases or not, you know what's out there so I'm using you as scouts. I have promised to keep as open a mind as I possibly can about what should be in the test, and I've mostly done that, except for the poor ODAC (sorry Anoobis), which all of the data available says is not the right match for my imperfect personal audio appreciation system. Why? Because I'm the guy who paid $1K extra to get the added realism that the LCD-3 offers over the LCD-2, even though I went into that particular comparison test hoping that the HE-500 would be my favorite so I could save money. So the chances of me liking the ODAC over 9 well-regarded mid-range DACS is pretty close to zero. As I said in my earlier post, that isn't fair to the ODAC.
My mind is mostly open about what I audition, as long as it has to potential to be competitive. I believe my mind is also as open as possible about picking a winner among those that do make the field. I owe no allegiance to any manufacturer or supplier. As I proved with my prior tests of both cans and amps, I'll pick whichever hardware I like best, price be damned. If my current XDA-1 wins, fine. If the most expensive new DAC wins, that's fine too. If I'm stupid enough to fall in love with 2 units, I'll probably buy both, as I did with the amps. I like spaghetti, and I'll eat it every day of the week if that's what it takes to afford what I want. Within reason, of course: price limit for this comparison test is $2500, unless somebody can make a
VERY compelling case for something slightly above that range. But I'm not spending $10K or even $5K on a DAC. My insanity has some limits.
And finally, why should you help me in this? First, because I'm such a nice person. Okay, maybe not. How about because I write so well? No? How about because I write so much? Hah! How about I break in your new Yulong DAC for you (Hey, that's apparently enough for one of you, thankfully)? Maybe because you'll feel better about your own DAC choice if I pick the one you already own?
Or maybe because in return for your help I will provide as exact and detailed a set of reviews as I can regarding how I think each DAC sounds to me. My reviews will be biased, but I hope that I will be able to provide some service to some of you: not a definitive answer, but a few clues or snippets of descriptive information that might help you narrow or broaden your own choices of what products to audition for yourself. And maybe a little entertainment value, whether in reading my verbose posts, or in arguing with me about them. That is why we come here, after all... right?
