Is there any such thing as a bad sounding DAC these days?

@curiousjim 

Looking again, I no longer see a used one listed. They are an Aqua dealer so you could conceivably get a new one and return it if you can stomach/afford the restocking fee. 

FFT is a mathematical transformation from time to frequency domain. Our ears respond to frequencies over time. The details of how they do that is a whole different story.  chervokas  seems to have a good handle on it.

Not to derail the thread, but one of the cool things about our hearing that's different than a Fourier Transform is that, yes, we process the separate frequency components of the complex wave separately, but we process them at the same time that we process the timing, because, at least up to about 5kHz, the nerve impulses generated by the movement of the stereocilia are phase locked to the input wave,  so our hearing is simultaneously using information about which location on the basilar membrane/which hair cells/which neurons are being activated and also the phase locked/timing neural spike pattern of that activity. 

When the very first CD players came out, Philips (who as co-inventors of CD had an inside run, after all) were widely deemed to have a better sound than their competitors.

Philips used quadruple oversampling which allowed much more gentle filtering than the sharp brick-wall filters needed for a hard cut-off around 44-kHz.

On the other hand, with the laser resistor-trimming technology used back then, it was hard to get monotonic increases in output to match the input bit settings.  Philips simply dropped the last two bits.

@stuartk 

I was surprised at the price, as it’s over $1000 LESS than retail!  Unless something has changed,  it was supposed to go for around $10,000 here. I haven’t sprung it on my wife yet, but there’s no time like the present.😉😉

My first DAC was a Scott Nixon USB. It was limited to 44k/16, but sounded very good.