I don’t think its pleccbow but its more about implementation vs actual chip. Personally I’m a fan of R2R stuff, they don’t measure as well but acoustically I find them more pleasing.
Anyway, my recommendations for “relatively” inexpensive R2R stuff is soekris 1421, 1541, Holo cyan, spring, schiit gumby, yggy, the ares dacs, metrum stuff and the massdrop airist r2r if you don’t mind the drama surrounding it.
what’s the drama around the airist, AC?
That the design is stolen. There is a lot of info on the (mass)drop comments
if it was truly stolen, there would have been a law suit. could it have been bought and rebadged?
*allegedly stolen is what I meant, you look around for more information
Also civil lawsuits are expensive for both the plaintiff and defendant, can take years and lots of time and energy, and also the person’s design may not even have any standing to sue depending on the situation. It would most likely have gone to private arbitration or mediation to resolve a conflict, but that can also be expensive as well (but still a fair bit less then an actual lawsuit through the us court system)
who’s design was supposedly stolen?
also R2R is an old tech, so the patent may have expired.
Even if it is stolen - why should anyone care. Asking those prices that R2R dacs have is ridiculous - especially if a company can make it for 350… Clearly the tech is not worth as much some are asking.
Tbh for 350 I would expect better DSD support a well
Patent and ip law is out of my realm (mainly do contractual disputes), but just because a basic design is older, if you have a specialized design that can change things. Also I believe the other dac was the Hibiki R2R, a Chinese dac (I think), so international disputes like that are even more complicated and harder to pursue.
I didn’t really pay much attention to this dispute because I didn’t really care lol. R2R designs can be fairly similar looking to one another
DSD support in an r2r dac is harder to accomplish, and especially at this price range. You could just play dsd over PCM and be just fine
how important is DSD? does Spotify, Tidal or Amazon Music use it?
It is a fairly niche format developed by sony and used on the sacd. I really liked it because typically music was remastered with more care. It’s really not much to worry about tbh. You can also convert sacds to pcm lossless and have very similar sound
you say niche…so I guess the media streaming services don’t use it. 
No, it would also take an absurd amount of bandwidth to stream dsd lol
I downloaded a single dsd sampler
It was like 10 gigabytes for 14 tracks.
Also not worth it. Even the rock samples were smooth jazz soft rock stuff
Yeah you are really restricted on genre lol, although you can actually find stuff like 80s mainstream on dsd sometimes, or other classic albums that were remastered for sacd. But good luck finding hip hop on there. I feel like I have the only hip hop release on sacd in existence lol since no one seems to know it exists. It’s Ludacris chickn n beer lol
Yeah. It’s like what… the most mainstream performer on nativeDSD is Michael Jackson.
They have an edm section on that site. It sounds like smooth jazz but electronic imo.
Like a fusion type sound I’m guessing. More mainstream artists with a wide variety of genre are releasing 24/88.2 or 24/96 or higher which is nice but dsd is still somewhat niche
DSD seems hard to play on windows. dont you need a special player or something?
I use foobar2k and then a plugin that allows me to send dsd directly to my dac using asio. You can also get a plugin that instead converts it to pcm and plays it. Or just convert your dsd files to flac
isnt there a loss on sound quality if i convert to flac?