Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

LOL, just went down a R2R DAC rabbit hole... and there is a lot of garbage in there, it's worse than audiophile ethernet cables.

The vast majority of R2R DACs are no better than the DAC chips since 2014 on this page http://stephan.win31.de/dac-adc-hist.htm if not actually worse (because they colour the audio in some way — reviews are saying things like "warmer" whilst also saying "transparent", wut?).

There is a perfect DAC, it's measurable, and we're into the age of diminishing returns where they're all effectively as good as each other (so long as the chip comes from the last 6 years).

The one thing these "audiophile" DACs have is a beautiful bit of packaging, something like this https://parttimeaudiophile.com/2022/05/20/holo-audio-may-kte-dac-review/ is gorgeous. Every bit of that is nice and you'd want it visible, it's an aesthetic dream. But, there are no improvements over the sound from one of these recent chips in a less attractive box, so what someone is really spending their money on is the very attractive packaging of the chip in a gorgeous box.

I say that as someone who chose the RME device because it's attractive. As @Timmeh says I could've paid less for the pure DAC rather than AD/DA, but further I could've paid even less if I'd chosen something like the Topping D90 https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/topping-d90-balanced-usb-dac-review.10519/ which has the king of chips the AKM AK4499.

Thing is though... none of these chips is any better than the other in any distinguishable way now.

Mostly I have opted for:

1. The looks of the RME device are nice.
   
2. It's an insane device as it's a kind of audio router / audio digital signal processor, which gives a lot of control in the future (as well as allowing me to transfer tapes and vinyl to digital).
   
   

The RME device is pretty sweet looking:

Admittedly not as pretty as the HoloAudio though: