High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.


Something that came as a surprise to me is how good DAC's have gotten over the past 5-10 years.

Before then, there was a consistent, marked improvement going from Redbook (44.1/16) to 96/24 or higher.

The modern DAC, the best of them, no longer do this. The Redbook playback is so good high resolution is almost not needed. Anyone else notice this?
erik_squires
I don't know if there is an affordable 24bit R2R DAC yet.

Affordable is of course different for everyone but my MHDT Lab Pagoda (PCM1704) sells for about $1300 and does 24/192 natively. Sounds wonderful.
 The simple answer great streaming it is a product like blue sound. By the time you try to work this out the kinks with a computer you could afford a blue sound Node 2
The vast majority of my music is 16/44.1 and my focus has always been to get the most out of the format. The first DAC which proved to me 16/44.1 was "good enough" was the dB Audio Labs Tranquility. According to many the DAC, with it's cheap TDA1543 chip and lousy measurements, couldn't possibly sound good. Apparently dB Audio Labs subscribes to the "everything matters" philosophy of DAC design and proved the naysayers wrong. I still own and use the Tranquility. 

A few years ago I decided to explore the high-res world for myself and purchased enough good sounding music to care about hearing it at the native rate. A couple of DACs later and I finally settled on the MHDT Lab Pagoda. This DAC sounds fabulous not only with 16/44.1 but higher rates also. Funny though, I have little interest in high-res at this point. Good old Redbook is all I require.