ESS chips

The current interfaces that use ESS chips from Apogee and MOTU sound excellent. They mostly use the cheaper ES9016 and sound better than most Chi-fi boxes and hi-fi gear with the 18,28, and 38. The most recent Apogee boxes have no glare. Typical Apogee coloration but they sound good. The MOTU boxes are rawer.

 

Cost itself isn't the issue. Tons of gear that sounds perfectly fine uses 30 cent opamps. It's the incompetent designers and manufacturers seeing how cheap electronics are to make and people drooling over parts and not sound realizing that they can sell the droolers cheap crap and they won't be able to tell the difference. Then they value engineer already cheap bom gear. The stuff that uses truly shitty power supplies to save money like budget laptops is well known. This is how we get Behringer, bargain basement interface, chifi, and massdrop SMSL exclusives along with brands like Focusrite, Audient, and Presonus pushing "too cheap to be true" lower level products that perform miserably compared to what they were cut down from.

Nobody has mentioned how duller, lower fidelity gear that cannot reproduce the recorded harmonics, that is sins of omission gear, can survive idiocy better because it does less for the idiocy (streaming services, lossy codecs, Youtube, sound bars and other bottom of the barrel transducers, etc) to f**k up. It's similar to lardasses and sick people being able to hold down refined carbodydrates like Doritos and saltines while puking up real food. The wonderbread gear (RME, THX Massderp amp, a Focusrite Scarlett for not completely, 100% awful boxes SBAFers might be familiar with) might actually be able to perform better in the system but the entire system still needs an intervention.

 

Interesting, also Ayre used the 9016S in their QB9 when they upgraded to dsd if not mistaken. Nice sounding dac as well.

 

Very interesting topic and I must say that I agree with members who say DAC chip itself is maybe just a starting base but 90% (or even more in my opinion) of the actual sound quality comes from other parts and engineering skill. For example I listened to more then 10 DACs with Sabres inside and their overall sound quality differs wildly.

For example, lately I've been using and really liking Khadas Tone Board with ES9038Q2M - it has full and juicy sound signature compared to most DACs I tried. Topping D50 with that same ES9038Q2M sounds much thinner and harsher, grainy in the top end. Unfortunately I heard people saying it's because of Sabre and recommending others to switch to AK powered DACs if they want mellower sound. But with all due respect, that's just a load of BS . I also had a SMSL M100 wih AK chip that sounded so similar to D50 (analytical, harsh) that I can barely make a difference switching the two of them. But listening to D50 and Khadas which use the exact same Sabre, you would simply never guess they have the same heart.

 

Admittedly I don't have that kind of experience but I'm working on getting there slowly.

I understand there's an underlying character of each DAC family and I never questioned that. In fact I believe I can already sense some of it (to the extent of my experience). For example, if I would to make a ranking of my favorite DACs - statistically I would prefer Sabre models to AKM models (without getting into details why). So again, I don't argue it can't be noticed, especially by someone with high listening mileage like you mentioned. I just wanted to say that final sound quality is much more influenced by other things.

So it's safe to say that statistically I prefer Sabre sound signature and I'm not a big fan of AKMs. That said I am a fan of Modi 3 and would recommend it over most of these cheap Sabres (SMSLs, Toppings, Dragonflies...) without thinking twice. Hence my opinion that when it boils down to choosing one DAC in a particular price range, one should never choose by the DAC chip manufacturer. Good AKM implementation >> Bad Sabre implementation and vice versa.