The Marantz CD-63 had a 14-bit DAC chip but also used a 4x oversampling filter.
How could a 14-bit DAC chip sound the same as a 20-bit DAC chip?
Are you guys from ASR??
Just saying. I understand the technology changed markedly over the years. But me personally I just don’t really hear it. Sometimes I think I do but I have to concentrate very hard in an unnatural way when listening to music so the SQ debates just go above my head TBH. I have enjoyed experimenting with HQPlayer filters but I couldn’t get it working stably and gave up. Mostly now I use the fast minimum phase filter on a Mark Levinson 5101. But I often revert to the brickwall filter with 80s recordings as to my ears it often works better with old CD’s I have from that time. It is an ESS chip, I don’t remember the model number. I also have a Rose 150B which uses the same ESS chip and ESS house filters as the Mark Levinson. I just cannot distinguish them. The Marantz CD-63 will soon be 40 years old. The Marantz CD-63 works great in this system. Maybe there are differences in the sound. I don’t know. I don’t really hear them. I usually think my old 80’s CDs sound better on the Marantz but there is no double blind testing going on. A 6-pack is usually involved so its probably nostalgia.
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The moment that the differences are masked by the rest of the reproduction chain, the listening environment or the ears doing the listening. To illustrate consider the extreme example, how could they sound different to someone who has lost their hearing?
Clearly all DACs don’t “sound” the same.
There are good DACs and bad ones. The good ones accurately re-create the analog waveforms encoded in the digital input signal. The bad ones don’t. All the good ones, therefore, “sound” the same by definition, as they all produce the same analog signal from the same digital signal. The bad ones could sound like anything, I suppose.
And if you’re talking about “an audible difference between DAC chips”, again, you need to specify, which chips? I’m sure there are bad chips as well as good chips, so the logical answer would be “yes, there are audible differences between DAC chips.”
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Even if DAC chip is the same, but the custom firmware from different companies won’t be the same.
This statement makes no sense. It’s like saying that there is only one way to design a car that can drive from San Francisco to San Jose. There are of course many ways to design a DAC chip. There is only one constraint, however: that the output accurately represent the input.
I thing the analogue output stage design makes more of a difference to how it sounds than the DAC chips themselves. I do hear a difference between my DACs one uses ESS DAC chip the other AKM and I do prefer one over the other but I think this is more than likely they better analogue electronics in the other.
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I don’t think DAC chips allow custom firmware. At most, you can bypass the internal oversampling filters by feeding them an already oversampled signal, but that falls under the “difference between filters” category.
Whether they come from the D/A stage or from the analog stage, those differences would be measurable at the DAC output, right?
Maybe it is interesting to see how Linn design their own DAC https://www.linn.co.uk/us/technology/organik
Not that interesting. They lost me at
rest assured, we don’t do anything unless we can do it better than what’s available elsewhere.
Once you get to perfect reproduction, “better” isn’t possible.
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“Designing and building our own DAC, completely from scratch, was no exception. It was only worth doing if the result would be significantly better than our previous designs utilising 3rd-party chips.”
That’s your answer: they don’t use 3rd-party chips. And what @Bill_Janssen said.
Just what I’ve found in ESS chip brochure (in my Topping E50).
Look for
“Customizable filter characteristics” and
“3 preset filters, programmable filter coefficients for custom sound signature
2 audio signal processors for custom filter architectures and analog/digital mixing”
CUSTOM SOUND SIGNATURE?!
Well, that explains a lot… 
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That also falls into the filter type category. Even without this feature, you can still customize the filter by feeding the DAC an oversampled signal that bypasses the internal filter. Offering the choice of custom coefficients makes it easier to customize (still subject to the DAC’s restrictions) and lowers the cost. I suspect this was done to accommodate MQA.
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I would assume so.
Can’t say I notice that much difference with the filters side of things. On my SMSL SU9 there is an additional filter setting called sound color that’s supposed to change the preamp sound I can’t hear a difference in any of these either.
Those chips are cheap! A Burr Brown integrated DAC costs a few USD, even if the DAC or streamer using them costs upwards of $1,000. Your argument ignores the market, brand, and the buyer.
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You should quote all of my text. Because “those chips” don’t exist! My argument does not ignore the market, brands, or the buyer…
That is not my main point, the point that I am trying to say is that not all DACs sound the same.
I got to thinking about what a company that advertises this could do, with the advent of perfect cheap Chi-Fi DACs? I suppose they could get out of the DAC market altogether.
Or they could take the road already pioneered by the vendors of tube amps. Those guys know they can’t do perfect, so they capitalize on the distortions and noise their gear produces:
OK, so we can’t make our tubes sound perfect. So what? Why not buy our stuff anyway? It’s nostalgic. Maybe you’ll like the sound of our distortions better than the sound of those perfectly linear amps being turned out by Hypex. It could happen, right?
And their cultists buy into that. So why would DAC cultists not also drink the Kool-Aid? (And what, exactly, is Kool-Aid in aid of?)
Of course the cheapest thing to do would be to simply take that marketing slogan off their Web site.