AKM makes the best DACs

You seem to be working hard to be linear in your interpretation of words and their possible meanings.

Audio uses engineering to sculpt it's scientific explorations of it's core intent: the exploration of more.

Exploration of science is by necessity and reality, philosophical in nature and type. As philosophy is the parent and origin of science ...and we can't get bigger than and explore science - without philosophy.

Ergo, philosophy is core and endemic to audio.

So, I made what i thought was a reasonable warning to be careful about technologies as absolutism.

which, you did not do. you stated your experience tended to center around a certain view or point. Nothing wrong with that in my book.

but... let's take it one step further back and explore again.

What we find when we look at the market, is that there is a strong tendency to find the peak of the market, in accuracy and correctness, in digital, centers around ladder and/or R2R and/or discrete dacs. (they being different names for the same type of DAC)

@teo_audio 

So much gibberish.  Also, there's no apostrophe in "its."

The problem with ESS is that for some reason it is the brand of DAC chip that's been latched on to by any DAC maker who can afford the $95 or so for the best of their chips.  Also, they make lesser lines of chips, some others of which carry the 9038 number.  They also make less expensive chips that carry the ESS name and they continue to sell 9028 chips.  Less expensive ESS chips are used in AudioQuest Dragonflys, for example.

So a whole bunch of relatively inexpensive, and some poorly made, DACs can advertise that they have the same chip as the $10,000 Weiss DAC.  The unsuspecting, believing it is all in the chip are incented to buy.  So there are a lot of poor examples of DACs out there using ESS chips.  Could be that the "average" DAC using an ESS chip is not a very good performer. 

I'd venture to say, though, that given three generations and three decades of development there has likely been more R & D into ESS chips than any other.

Don't get upset I didn't say ESS.

Oh come on @erik_squires , the DAC he has been pushing has the ESS 😄

There are many great-ladder dac chips -R2R out there to even consider any AKM chips 

not 1 upper dac maker use them ,buy a Topping if that’s your thing.