Why would this make one DAC sound different to another, assuming they both measure well? The ‘bits’ are a digital representation of an analog waveform, which the DAC then coverts back to an analog signal. Either the resultant analog signal is accurate, or it’s not. If it is - and this is what most functioning DACs should be able to do - each one should sound pretty much the same.
Note that @Graeme_Finlayson said “similarly measuring DACs”. He didn’t say every DAC would be identical.
I deliberately left loudspeakers out of it, because those, and their interactions with the room are where the biggest audible differences exist by far in any audio system.
My loudspeakers are very capable, in fact; though I didn’t design them. I merely designed and built the cabinets.
DIYing loudspeakers is one way to leverage great performance and save a huge amount of money. DIY designers don’t have to make design compromises based on the price point of the finished product.
Most commercial manufacturers’ driver BOM is around 10% of the cost of the finished product.
My drivers were 60% of the cost of the speaker, the crossover components another 30% and cabinets very little due to having most of the materials to hand from other projects. A few days of my time was all that was needed.
The Scan-Speak Revelator and Illuminator drivers I used don’t appear in commercial products until you really get into ‘high-end’. Few manufacturers put £700 of driver and £300 of crossover components into a build unless it sells for big money.
Cabinets are 18mm and 36mm Baltic birch plywood, fully glued and heavily damped to control resonances. Total build cost ~£1100
Positioning in the room is optimal and the room is acoustically treated.
My system is transparent, and revealing. ‘High-end’? No, not in price. Performance? Pretty uncompromising…
Hi. Graeme. It was tongue in cheek. It certainly sounds like a great speaker, those drivers are very special. Send a pic, if you don’t mind. Kind regards
I think you meant £1,100? @ 10% BOM,commercial speakers would need to be about £11,100 for a comparable performance?
To categorically state that as long as DAC’s measure the same, they sound the same is ridiculous. From experience I know that DAC’s sound different.
By that faulty-logic, all turntables must sound the same then? 
Do all turntables measure the same, then? I very much doubt that.
Nope.
High quality Amazon Basic cables are perfect at about £6 made to an internationally recognised standard, they will do everything required to deliver data required.
A £15 - £20 TP-Link or Netgear switch, also made to a published, internationally recognised standard will also go above and beyond what is required to deliver the data.
Routers, any of the major brands again will do what is required to deliver the data required.
Decisions around cabling , switches and routers only need to revolve around what your network needs are, they play zero part in any sound quality concerns.
Any company suggesting otherwise is simply playing on human’s vulnerabilities and exploiting you.
Thanks, typo corrected! 
I cannot see that anyone is saying that all turntables sound the same. The point of the thread to me is that the commoditisation that digital makes possible re-writes the price/performance relationship vs. analogue.
I know the thread is in the hardware router/ethernet cable domain but my own experience is that commoditisation in the digital hardware domain is forcing a new generation of digital performance differentiation into the software domain. It’s strictly off topic I know, but by far the biggest gain in overall SQ I have experienced in recent years is digital room correction and convolution. This is in a range of systems from the low-end of high end thru mid-range to budget. Within the constraints of inputs/outputs and integration of various components I have found the digital components (all measuring well) to be interchangeable to my ears. The big differentiator is the speaker and room acoustics.
An you’ve done those comparisons blind with level-matched output on DACs that measure very similarly?
Thought not.
Turntables are entirely different. They rely on a spinning platter maintaining a constant speed and an electro-mechanical transducer to convert movement into an analogue signal. Totally different to how a DAC performs and measures.
Precisely: in the same way as we don’t expect speakers to measure “the same”, I doubt even well-designed turntables (and phono cartridges) would measure the same because they all suffer from distortions which are orders of magnitudes higher than those one would find in a well-designed DAC.
Digital to Analogue Converters are much more than ‘just’ a DAC ‘chip’. There are upsampling FPGA’s, output stages etc that make a DAC ‘much more’ than a just a DAC.
For example, Linn uses the AKM AK4497EQ DAC chip in their ‘Katalyst’ range of streamers, but the ‘way’ they implement that chip is very different from other manufacturers.
This AKM DAC chip is used in other DAC’s and streamers, but to say that they will sound ‘identical’ to the Linn Katalyst DS just because they ‘measure the same’ is disingenuous and nonsensical.
You simply cannot take a ‘flat earth’ approach to this. Well, you can, but you’d be wrong.
If, in all important respects, two DACs measure the same, they should sound the same. How could they not? However, if one DAC implements something differently then it’s likely that they won’t measure the same, nor will they necessarily sound the same. That doesn’t sound nonsensical to me.
Just a basic question: what kind of measurement(s) and what are the criteria are you talking about?
I would be amazed if the AKM DAC used in both the Linn Katalyst DS and the Astell & Kern SEM2 ‘measure’ differently. It’s the same DAC chip. after all.
I would be equally amazed if they ‘sound the same’. As I have previously mentioned, it’s how that DAC is implemented in a DAC/Streamer that matters. They just don’t sound the same. And I’m not alone in that opinion.
I was being deliberately vague, in response to a fairly vague comment. The only way they should sound different, assuming they both use the same DAC chip, is if something funky is being done on the analog side of the chain.
Here is a realy good 3-part article on DAC implementation.
Measurements can tell us pretty much everything we need to know:
Linearity - is the frequency response flat to within a fraction of a dB across the audible range?
IMD - does the filtering arrangement cause any intermodulation artifacts within the audible band?
Noise - what noise is there on the analogue output
Distortion - what does the distortion look like in terms of level and is it 2nd order, 3rd order etc.?
Multi-tone test - are any spurious inter-tones generated between the fundamental tones? Product of IMD.
0dBFS output level - should be ~4 V balanced, ~2V single-ended. Is the signal level high enough to drive the full output of your amp? Not too high that it saturates the input of your preamp/poweramp. Some DACs run ‘hot’, i.e. higher than these values. Back to back with another DAC, they’ll sound subjectively better because the playback is louder! This is why output level matching by measurement is vital when comparing different DACs
SINAD - how far above the sum of the noise and distortion is the signal? It’s generally accepted that better than 110dB is audibly transparent.
Output impedance - how low/high is it? Is it frequency independent? This will tell us if there are likely to be any effects on frequency response downstream.
Square wave response - looks at the effects of the DAC filters in the time/frequency domains.
This is sound, science/engineering based criteria on which to measure a DAC’s perfomance. No flat-earth doctrines here.
If two DACs measure closely enough that the differences are below the audibility threshold, then to all intents and purposes, they will sound the same.
Arguing about this stuff is like arguing the case for creation, when science demonstrably proves the case for evolution.
You’ve agreed with me!
No two distinctive implementations of a DAC using the same DAC chip will ever be the same. They may well ‘measure’ the same, but will probably sound different.
Therefore different DAC’s will sound different. Ipso facto!
If you’re replying to me, you’ve completely missed the point of my post. Ipso facto, I said nothing of the kind.
Martin, I’m having a hard time understanding what you seem to be trying to say. By “distinctive”, do you mean “distinct” or “distinguishable”, or as you actually write, “distinctive”? If the latter, what makes a DAC “distinctive”? A fancy case?
Also, why are you talking about “using the same DAC chip”? The argument (which by the way is off topic for this thread) was about DACs which measure the same, which means they have the same analog output for the same digital input; no one else was talking about the DAC chips being the same. So of course the analog amplification stage is part of the measurements.
Furthermore, if they “‘measure’ the same”, that’s the sound that’s being measured, so how could they sound different? And why is “measure” in scare quotes? What do you mean to imply by that?