Thank you. I have and will, although the A26 seems to be gaining on, if not surpassing, the R26 based on the reviews I've seen so far. Plus, used R26 units are infrequent and used prices still pretty high at this stage. Would like to audition the R26, that's for sure!
Yes, R2R history goes way back to the last century. R2R IC's were standard in the days of PCM63 etc.
With discrete resistor ladder R2R DACs look back to Dan Lavrys ground breaking work, which Holo have been trying to emulate. Also look at MSB.
The theme here is American research and development, whether with Burr Brown ICs or independent geniuses doing ladders, has been many decades ahead of the current popular resurgence.
The current popularity is thanks to Chinese breaking the price barrier and the audiophile consistent reports that R2R often just sound better than noise modulating DS in terms of timbrel fidelity and microdynamics.
I forgot to mention the German site 'mother of sound' that helped me understand the benefits of non-oversampling and (no) filters to the time domain. And a big thanks to our fine Dutch engineers that made the Philips chips (and 'the bird' to the marketing team... Fu, for messing things up). Anyway, 'mother of sound' has some strange notions that made me frown, but his scopes of various dac methods made me realise what I heard.
The only method that has no pre-ringing (echo in reverse announcing a transient, which is very un-natural and fatiguing) is non-oversampling, no digital filtering, R2R. You do get aliasing tones, that I could hear very clearly with a frequency sweep at 0dB approaching 20kHz. But in music there are no high pitched notes that loud and that high. So don't try to fix something that doesn't occur in music at the cost of smearing the treble (phase). The old engineering adagio: if it ain't broken, don't fix it. Also, with 96kHz, they move out of audible range anyway.
This makes the sound of details 'soft' because there is no hash around the original tingles and cymbal splashes. No exaggeration. No msg, no artificial flavoring. But it's all there.
It's very much like what you see on an original photo with good indirect lighting. It looks kind of soft. But you see it exactly as it registered. Now you can 'enhance' it with a 'sharpen' or 'unsharp mask' filter to make it seem sharper. But what it does is artificially make a light grey, dark gray transition transform to light grey, white, black, dark grey. Now you can see details more pronounced, but it soon becomes agressive, unrealistic, removes nuances and takes out the color if you overdo it.
Same goes for sound. Or 'room correction'. If you keep 'enhancing' the signal you may get more punch and detail that was never there. Information that is lost can never be retrieved with algorithms that can only guess. So I am a minimalist: use the least possible components of the best quality so as to keep as much of the information possible.
One big advantage of R2R is also: you don't need an amplification stage (i/v with opamps or tubes) after the actual dac. This ties in with my minimalist philosophy. Kiss. Keep it simple stupid!
I no longer recommend the newer burson conductor 3. I got rid of mine. Just way too much of an electronic signature due to the switching power supply they now use. I much prefer my older burson 160 headphone amp It sounded way more analog like than their newer units. I do have a schiit bifrost 2 which I prefer. It is a very accurate dac. I would not call it a warmer sounding dac. It does have a similar signature as the ydragasil OG. which uses the same analogue device chip as the yaggy. For the money it is a very good dac that hits above its modest cost. Have not heard the latest bifrost dac . It uses different dac chips than the original bifrost 2.
I no longer recommend the newer burson conductor 3. I got rid of mine. Just way too much of an electronic signature due to the switching power supply they now use. I much prefer my older burson 160 headphone amp It sounded way more analog like than their newer units.
They use discrete implementation of opamp architecture. It is a multistage negative feedback that kills a sound. Delta-Sigma users don't care, as high frequency components are already filtered out. For a ladder DAC it is important to chose non-feedback amplification method. Little more distortions (still in inaudible range), but no flattering dynamic response.
If you could get a used one, that sort of makes it a no-brainer. Just like I had to act quick on the last available Rose streamer at a 450 discount. That's 850 cheaper than the new model (price of a nice dac). Even if you don't like it, you don't lose on it.
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Just like I had to act quick on the last available Rose streamer at a 450 discount. That's 850 cheaper than the new model (price of a nice dac). Even if you don't like it, you don't lose on it. 
