NOS DAC's without any digital filtering?

My system is now pretty close to a recording studio setup + NOS R2R DAC. And.. there are a lot of bad recording out there. The vast majority of supposedly hi-res recording (from the jpop side) simply sounds worse than the CD release. I pretty stopped with hi-res and went back to CD release.

Was trying to score a 15 year old DAC today, but it went for $300+ (it was $1000 MSRP 15 years ago).

Recent DACs really suck badly...

And yes, Zd542, the Directstream sounded horrible. The market price for it just keeps going to down reflects that. $2950 and no buyers.

I find its getting harder to find a bad sounding DAC these days. At Walmart maybe. The sound from those in even decent quality commercial devices, like those from Apple, is so much better than what was around in years past. I find the differences exist but its getting harder and harder to tell, which is a good thing. Digital technology continues to progress at light speed it seems. The other factors that make for good sound like transducer quality and matching amplification seem to practically be much bigger considerations for getting good quality sound these days, whereas in the past, source device quality was often the bottleneck.

"09-24-15: Coli
And yes, Zd542, the Directstream sounded horrible. The market price for it just keeps going to down reflects that. $2950 and no buyers. "

I never asked about the Directstream. A lot of other posters have asked you questions. Why not answer them?

Okay, that makes complete sense now. Thanks!

So even with a NOS DAC I assume there is still benefit of using hi-res files? Why would somebody want to up-sample redbook in their software (foobar, JRMC, Amarra, etc.)? I haven't tried this in a few years but I recall that I preferred the sound w/o the upsampling (in JRMC).

Hmmm.