Wanted to thank you bidn for taking the time to share your opinion on this and for the Audio Science link. I had listened to an original Bifrost a few years ago and thought it sounded good. The reality was all the other components in that system were foreign to me as well, so how much of what I was hearing was influenced by the Bifrost itself? Guess I’ll never really know.
As subjective as high end audio is, coupled with not being able to properly audition, makes purchasing audio equipment online quite the challenge. All we can generally do is research and ask questions in the hopes of arming ourselves with the right information before making a purchase, a purchase that hopefully avoids the all to common ‘audio equipment buyer’s remorse’ factor.
Anyways, your post put me on the right track. After further researching Schiit… yikes! I think I’ll steer clear. I almost fell prey to their clever marketing and was about to pull the trigger on a Bifrost 2. Thankfully I didn’t. I’m now eyeing the Topping D70 and SMSL-SU-8. I also see there’s a “D90” is around the corner.
I still want to further research the whole R2R thing before making a decision though. In posts I had seen elsewhere, the general consensus had been how R2R Multi DACs ‘sound better’ than Delta-Sigma, despite having worst measurements. So is R2R kinda like tubes in this regard? Tube gear generally does measure poorly compared to their transistor counterparts, but to many people’s ears sounds better (including mine). Here’s a great article on this subject: https://kenrockwell.com/audio/why-tubes-sound-better.htm
So is there validity to R2R sounding better that Delta-Sigma? That’s my new question moving forward.