AKM makes the best DACs

I own the gustard X26pro 2x ES9038.

Soundnews tested it, the best dac under 2000$, as good as its dac reference Matrix element X which costs more than 3000$.

I find it so smooth as my Metrum amethyst, but the gustard is more detailed, more faster, more structured soundstage, and especially the instruments are more realistic !

No digital brightness !

R2R, FPGA  then it comes down to te line codes and how the dac works with diffrent Algorithms.

Andreas Koch of Playback Design lead the team at Sony for DSD

This thread doesn’t make much sense to me: clocking, cables and the DAC’s analogue section are WAY MORE determinant of a dac’s sound than the chips used. The whole debate about R2R, Delta Sigma, FPGA is in my mind and experience equally blown out of proportion

I agree there are much more important criteria in evaluating dacs, however, I do observe a fair amount of stereotyping dac sound based on chip/topology. AKM more analog, Sabre high resolution, incisive, R2R more analog. FPGA only one not fitting into single niche.

I presume many hold these biases when deciding on new dac, this sells other topologies short.  The one bias I don't understand is correlating highest resolution digital with increased listening fatigue or digititus. This is fast becoming obsolete, one no longer has to pay price for seeking highest resolution.

I really have no idea why anyone would lump FPGA based DACs together.

The entire basis for an FPGA is that you have hardware that can be changed via code, so despite say PS Audio and Chord (I think) using an FPGA, since the construction of the DAC in the FPGA is proprietary I would have no reason to expect them to be at all similar.  Unless of course, they were sharing the chip maker and the underlying code libraries to build their DACs which is possible.