They’re good players, just misguided - and somewhat misshaped. The internal memory is now unusable and the battery can’t hold any useful charge, but I’m not using it anyway. The only time I listen on the go is in my car, where any decent head unit and a phone do the trick.
The majority vote YES, which makes (common) sense. 
Yep, that’s how you measure truth.
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Turning the two numbers around to '87 makes that statement true…
… which may well be the case, but still doesn’t equate to designing silicon chips by listening tests.
Actually, Texas Instruments markets SoundPlus audio chips for decades without the need to resort to said narrative.
The word common sense is usually used in the sense of ‘natural instinct’ regarding our usual understanding of practical issues.
On the other hand, science is the study of the physical and natural world based on observation and experimentation.
Science goes a step beyond common sense by providing scientific explanations for realities in life and those that we take for granted, and doesn’t just stop at face value to come to a conclusion.
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Science is not always dependable, it can be accepted by the scientific establishment and the public at large, but its theories may be modified or overturned when new evidence and new perspective emerges. Same thing with the engineering measurements (as advocated by some people here).
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So, you start off with an incorrect premise…so everything that follows will be incorrect as well.
I’m taking issue with this quote. The modifications and overturning you mention are just more dependable science.
It starts with a premise, your “incorrect” call is a personal opinion. The thread’s an effort to gather some anecdotal evidence and encourage debate.
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Not so. The statement suggests there is only way to design a DAC “chip” with the input and output being the same for any and all “properly” designed DAC “chips”. This is patently false. If this were true, there would not be hundreds of DAC chip designs out there. The same is true on the ADC side…do you really think there is only one “true” way to encode analog information into a digital signal?
A plethora of designs and implementations doesn’t PROVE there are differences. Marketing alone can explain the agony of choice. I do believe that DACs sound different BTW but I’ve nothing I’d be happy to present as evidence to back this up, only informal listening.
On this one yes, I’m with Claude Shannon all the way 
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[Moderated] If there were only one way to properly deconstruct and reconstruct analog information in the digital realm, there would only need to be one ADC chip design and one DAC chip design. Those chips would be super cheap because any company could make them.
I think this is the ultimate goal, nobody in design stage is thinking like “I want develop warm sounding DAC/ DAC chip”. And this is ultimate goal not only for DAC but for whole audio chain. To capture and reproduce sound waves exactly as it sounded. And thats the goal tried to be achieved for decades. Then any imperfections in audiochain are considered as personality or preference (some imperfections people like, some not).
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I think an open mind and a sense of humour is a good starting point 
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The function of a DAC is to turn a number into a voltage: there’s probably not much that can go wrong there. The difference is how quickly/dynamically this voltage can change to the new value, and how the transients are smoothed out.
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Personally, I think that the implementation of a DAC chip is much more important than the type of DAC chips which is used.
I presume that it should seem logic that a DAC chips which is not powered with a stable DC-voltage, will not be able to produce an analogue output correctly.
The same goes for the clock signal which is feeding to the DAC chip. If the clock has poor jitter-characteristics, you cannot have a good analogue output.
So, according me, the implementation of the DAC chip is making if a DAC is good or rather poor. Of course both sort of DACs will produce an analogue output, but not all DACs sound the same due to the implementation of all the electronics around the DAC chip.
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Modern science predominantly builds on formerly established models and is more about refining and better quantifying what theory proposes, especially in the electronics department, rather than overturning them - that’s a story of centuries past.
Audible difference between DAC chips?
No one has any real way to answer this, as they’ve never compared two devices where the only difference is the chip.
Do all DACs sound the same? No.
But the differences are way less than many audiophiles like to think and describe.
I’m sure in many cases they couldn’t tell the difference in a non-sighted test.
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Its much more complex, so yes all can sound different, but analog path, typology, not only “filter” or “chip”. I mean wrong questions here, coz all matters, some more, some less.
That’s exactly why I mentioned “properly designed DAC” that means SNR is below hearing treshold. Indeed one DAC may have -120dB and other -118dB. Then my question is if chip plays any role or not.
The question put in another way: if there are two DACs completely transparent (let’s say below -100dB SNR) but they have different flagship chip from world leading manufacturers, is there going to be any audible difference when the same filter is used by default?
I hear a clear difference between filters as well. To me it is just as clear with manufacturer supplied filters as with HQPlayer.
With DAC chips I am not so certain but on balance I voted no. I rarely sell my old equipment so I have CD players and DACs from Marantz and Meridian going back to the mid-80s. Its not like a shop at home as I probably only make major changes every 10 years or so but now and then I do feel the urge to dust them off for some nostalgia. I am always surprised how difficult I find it to distinguish old and new and different manufactures when using the same amplification / speakers / power supplies etc. Any small differences I am usually able to trace back to changes in the filter philosophy over the decades. I also rather suspect that there were synergies between the studio recording ADCs and the consumer playback DACs over the years as well. I often find myself thinking that my 80’s synth pop sounds much better on my knackered old Marantz CD-63 but somehow I manage to convince myself that my latest and greatest is somehow better. There is always a nagging doubt so I am certainly not hearing night and days differences.
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