If all dacs sounds the same most of this website is pointless. That's the paradox of ASR.
All
competently engineered DACs sound the same. ASR is useful for separating the well-engineered DACs from the poorly designed ones. Note that this has nothing to do with price, as evidenced by
the impressive results from that $9 Apple dongle, or
that $600 DAC that can't manage more than 10 bits.
In a way I agree with you somewhat, in the sense that a lot of activity on ASR happens on reviews that I personally find uninteresting: really cheap products that perform badly, or reasonably expensive products that perform well. Both are unsurprising, really, though I guess confirmation never hurts. I don't see much point on debating the relative merits of products that all have 80+ SINAD and no obvious flaws; they all sound the same, anyway. The reviews that do catch my interest are those where the performance of the product seems to defy its price tag: an excellent product sold at basement bargain prices (Apple dongle example), which is a rare find; or an expensive, yet poorly performing product, which is more common but always entertaining to laugh at.
To me, the most important and actionable reviews on ASR are those that tell you how cheap you can go before you run the risk of getting truly audible issues. Thanks to ASR (and
@amirm in particular), the next time I'm in the market for a stereo DAC and/or headphone amp, I know I can get away with only spending $9 so I can spend the rest of the budget on headphones or speakers, where it actually matters. That kind of data is invaluable if we ever hope to bring some sanity to the audio market.