I am no expert on digital although I certainly read a lot on DSD and DVD-A back in the day. However, once you use the standard D/A chip as lampizator acknowledges, you are at the point of a tweaker for the rest. It is like a speaker manufacturer who grabs the industry wide standard speaker elements. They have to talk about everything else because they are now locked into a generic approach. I'm not dissing anyone for doing that particularly as digital is beyond the capability of a small company to design and manufacture. The industry though has created a significant problem by downgrading the build quality and to my ears sonics of these new chips. Romy is stuck nervously watching his old CD player hoping it doesn't break down. Certainly the build quality is going down in general for digital. Unfortunately the old chips while built better do have some constraints that are best removed but no one wants to spend the money to make a well designed and well made contemporary chip. Thus trying to select the best of the current output is like trying to find the best pressing of a typical 70s era CBS classical record.
Having broken down and bought a midline Esoteric model a while ago, the difference in sonics seems more due to the transport than the DAC. I heard an Esoteric DAC but while nice enough did not wow me. However the CD player as a whole is better. It does at least reduce digital unpleasantness to the point where I am not bothered by it and can listen to the music more easily. So it is likely the transport which made the difference. I have no idea why a music server which bypasses the transport stage and simply reads a data file (outputted to an external DAC) should sound significantly worse but they do to my ears. Anyway I have become less interested in DACs and more interested in transports vs reading a music file.
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