Has DAC development run its course?
Although I am not a big digital fan I have always kept an eye on development of digital technology since I bought my first CD player back in the early 1980s ( Philips CD 104). That was nearly 40 years ago and since then I purchased numerous CD players throughout the 80s and 90s and indeed heard a lot more at friends houses. Of course back then we were all hostage to the internal DAC supplied with the CD player but it wasn't long before the off board DAC became available.
But just to go back a little to CD players. Obviously there were numerous manufacturers and designs with a few sounding reasonably good and as CD evolved and engineers tried to iron out some of the issues with digital nasties I think I was one of many folk who kept on swapping hoping newer technology would make them palatable to listen too. In fact I actually swapped more parts none CD related in my system to try and get a good sound out of CD but that's another story. I know some folk still use and enjoy the sound from their CD players but I think the biggest leap forward in digital audio came about when we were free to choose different DACs.
This for me was the next big improvement in digital audio sound quality and again numerous implementations of DAC designs evolved all sounding slightly different with different emphasis in the audio spectrum, ie either forensic and hyper detailed or warm and more analogue sounding. All the chip manufacturers seem to have a different house sound from Burr Brown to Sabre to AKM DAC chips and again their implementation in DAC designs was also multi varied. So obviously digital had so many flavours but which ones were closest to approximating the true nature of the original mastering?
Wind forward to the present day and we now have a state of play where DAC power supplies, clocks, and every aspect of DAC design has now been seemingly exhausted in the pursuit of eliminating RFI and any electrical noise. We are told jitter is now inaudible in some designs and they all seem to "measure" exceedingly well.
So have we now reached the end of DAC development and indeed have we got to the point where there is nothing more to be gained in digital audio.
In other words is this as good as it gets or does anyone think there is some eureka moment still to happen which will move digital audio onto the next level?