Maybe it IS all in the DAC chips

When CDs first came out, Philips players had a reputation for better sound quality than their competitors.  I think the reason was that Philips used four-times oversampling, so they could use a much gentler analogue filter than the ’brick-wall’ filters used by others, to remove digital artefacts.  On the other hand, Philips discarded the two least significant bits so their players had at most a 14-bit depth.  They did this because they could not laser-trim resistors accurately enough to get reasonable monotonicity with more bits.

(In the following, I try to use lower-case dac to indicate a chip-set, and DAC for a separate box containing one or more dacs.  Everywhere, actually )

When Sony and Philips introduced SACD, which uses a one-bit DSD format, they expected DSD to prevail but failed to market properly, especially in North America.  DSD is a natural extension of sigma-delta dac architectures, but completely at odds with ladder dacs including R2R.

So some modern dacs can easily handle DSD and PCM formats natively, while others can’t.  I’d put ESS and AKM in the native category, and current Burr Brown in the can’t category.

This came to a head for me when my Marantz universal disk player started to fail, and I bought an unknown (to me) player from Reavon.  The Reavon is very similar to the Oppo 105 but includes two Burr Brown dacs, a PCM-1690 for 8-channel unbalanced playback and a PCM-1795 for stereo (2 channel) balanced playback.  When I got it home, I was very happy with CD playback through XLR connections, but could almost instantly tell SACD playback was missing a lot.

It turns out that multi-channel SACD was being converted to CD quality before being fed to the dac.  Even more disappointing, two-channel SACD was also down converted to CD quality before being fed to the 2-channel dac.

Send digital over HDMI to my Marantz preprocessor and the sound is stunning.  But then, the Marantz has eight 2-channel AKM dacs that can natively process DSD and do a brilliant job on PCM, including Dolby Atmos.

So yes, dacs do matter, how you feed them also matters and what you feed them matters even more.

I haven’t read any reviews by satisfied Reavon owners.  Magnetar players get good reviews for SQ-they don’t “down convert” from DSD-but they get poor marks for reliability, as they tend to freeze up.

  I hope that my Oppo 105 lasts forever, outputting DSD over HDMI into my Bryston DAC3

A good chip may be important, but, a good chip is not necessarily the latest thing out there.  There are manufacturers that horde and use some very old chips because they believe they outperform modern chips.  Audio Note uses some very old chips and quite primitive conversion and put almost all of their effort in the analogue output of their DACs.  Their DACs measure poorly and sound magnificent--very smooth, rich, relaxed, and natural sounding.  Naim also uses ancient chips in their premium models; I think they also achieve good sound.

@dougholdcomp Nice, I have various DACs including my Theta DS Pro Gen V.  If i remember correctly it has four Burr-Brown 20-bit PCM63 DAC chips.

@mahler123 , have you considered the DBOB ? I want one for my Oppo 105, but it won’t work with my DAC. Mike B.