What's the best way to design a DAC? An amp? A preamp?
Clearly, there's no right way because if there were everyone would be doing it. I think there's plenty of evidence of the wrong way, but that's a topic for another day.
I'm pretty convinced that if you lined up 10 DACs from different designers and sorted them by technology type you'd get 10 different sounding results. Heck, we know that even the same technology tweaked with power supply or input buffering etc. sound different, so chip DACs, versus R2R DACs, versus DSD output DACs like DirectStream have to sound different.
And they do.
While I think design approach matters a lot to the designer, isn't it the results that matter most to the end users?
A great sounding audio product is a great sounding audio product despite (or because) of its design choices.
Another reminder why auditioning for best synergy in your system is the ultimate test.
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