Absolute top tier DAC for standard res Redbook CD

+1 Charles.  And Steve, thanks for the very informative and excellent post!

Regards,
-- Al
 

There is another way. Bruno Putzeys talking dac’s

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/36965-mola-mola-predac-review-compared-to-dave-dac/

My DSD is causing hick ups again. I'm going to have to contact Bricasti Monday and see if they can help. I tried connecting back to just the router and although everything works the sound is just not nearly as good.

Wow, thanks so much Steve.  That's some awesome stuff.  Not sure why some are so adamant to keep on trying to say R2R is always better etc...  

Guys, there are some great R2R DAC's.  MSB as has been mentioned as well as what may or may not be the best DAC in teh world, the Trinity DAC are R2R types.  Total DAC too if I recall correctly.  

I was at Audio Doctor's and heard the Aqua Formula I believe it was with the Paradigm 9H's and didn't like what I heard.  I know that speaker and it's just not my cup of tea, but it really was the worst I've ever heard them. Dave said it was the Aqua that wasn't burned in properly.  That may have been the case, but the highs were a total wreck and I don't think burn in was the problem, but I may be wrong.  

I got this off the DaVinci site on the Mk2 that Richfield Hunter and Matt both own and LOVE.  

Now we’ve decided to push the boundaries once again with Da Vinci MKII’s 32/768 kHz PCM resistor ladder DAC engine. And history will repeat itself.

Da Vinci MKII’s second decoding engine is a pure Delta-Sigma DAC capable of decoding DSD signals up to DSD256.

What does this mean?  They use both?  Either way you can find great DAC's using a lot of different tech and most can sound very very good.  Some not so much, lol. 

+1 Steve

In addition, it needs to be better understood that the ESS 9028 DAC is a massively parallel Delta-sigma DAC - in some implementations 512 delta-sigmas are summed in various ways to create a signal. Basically this ESS chip is a hybrid between R2R and a single 1 bit delta sigma. You can describe these chips as a massive R ladder DAC with all steps the same - instead of adding 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 (four discrete resistors on an R2R) to get a value of 15, the ESS DAC will sum up 15 discrete 1 bit delta sigmas to achieve a value of 15.

The benefit of massive single bit delta sigma DACs is that through a randomized selection process the DAC chooses randomly which delta-sigmas are summed to make the required valued. This leads to huge advantages in linearity and signal to noise over an R2R!!!

Hybrid DACs like ESS are simply better technology than an R2R by a significant margin as the specifications like THD+N show.