NOS DAC's without any digital filtering?

Get a NOS R2R dac and experience for yourself :) Do you remember how analog recording or broadcast sounds like? NOS DACs are the closest to analog sounding in the digital world.

My system is now pretty close to a recording studio setup + NOS R2R DAC. And.. there are a lot of bad recording out there. The vast majority of supposedly hi-res recording (from the jpop side) simply sounds worse than the CD release. I pretty stopped with hi-res and went back to CD release.

Was trying to score a 15 year old DAC today, but it went for $300+ (it was $1000 MSRP 15 years ago).

Recent DACs really suck badly...

And yes, Zd542, the Directstream sounded horrible. The market price for it just keeps going to down reflects that. $2950 and no buyers.

I don't see any questions directed at me in this thread?

You generally won't be able to tell how much modern DAC sucks until you got a really high end accurate system. That means super high damping (making integrating the amp into the speaker mandatory), plus you'll need balanced power (to reduce noise by 10-20db, a miracle btw), you'll also need low jitter input, but that still leaves a huge weak spot the analog XLR cable, so you'll need a very good one there too.

So if your current DAC sounds fine, don't upgrade your gears :)