Dac Technology Mature?

+10000 @melbguyone fantastic response!

Yes. Quite mature. There is now an effort to go backwards towards 20 year old DAC technology like R-2R. This is a sure sign that the market is saturated with mature products. There are simply are a lot of good DACs out there.

I think there will always be variations in sound quality, just like there are in preamps and amps. 

Now, is it mature? Over the past 10 years many DACs have stepped up. The tell for me is Redbook playback. It is suddenly MUCH better than before, and now Hi-Rez recordings don't hold the large improvement in sound quality they used to. One example of just before this cut-off is the ARC DAC 8. It really is mediocre with Redbook, but great with 96/24.

The Mytek Brooklyn is always better than the DAC 8 in all formats, and has a much smaller step (if any) from 44/16 to 96/24 or DSD. 

@frozentundra @jond Thanks for your kind words. PS Audio make some nice gear, though their designs as you pointed out have limited upgradeability. I see firmware updates for the dac as a kind of pandora’s box; you could just as easily subjectively move forward as backwards in sound.

A fully modular dac offers greater flexibility and would be more future proof which helps protect your investment. Vitus for example are offering a dac/streamer module for the new Vitus RI-101 integrated amp which supports Airplay, Roon, MQA, Tidal, Spotify, etc. And i’m told they are planning to offer a streamer module for my player in future.

Picking up on Shadorne’s comment, remember it’s all about implementation. And that comes down to the skill of the designer and the company’s manufacturing capacity. As I said, the digital part (incl: the dac chips) in total would contribute no more than about 15% or so to the complete sound. The psu and analog stage, combined with pcb layout matters more.

Mature?  I'd say exactly the opposite.  Although it's always existed, the differences between the delta-sigma DACs and the R2R and NOS multi-bit processors seems to be in its relative infancy.  Heck, we're still reconciling the convergence of tubes vs. solid state, and that's been going on for 40 years.  And digital technology is progressing at a faster pace than analog ever has.  So, five years from now I'd expect the digital processing landscape to look very different than it looks today.  The analog world, not so much.  So I guess mature is relative, and to me digital is the petulant teenager bursting with energy and embracing change in a fast-changing digital world.