@stadsbeplanner told me me via PN that he wasn't trolling. So i have to assume he is the same idiot i was 20 years ago. It's kind of off topic and old news for most of us, but i wrote it and might as well leave it here for anyone else who thinks these sound not as good because they are cheap and made from plastik:
why would you accuse me of trolling?
Fair enough, i apologize. Maybe you are just new here and still stuck in the 90ies Hifi magazine mindset, just like me until maybe 2015 or so.
The fact of the matter is, your hearing is incredibly good at detecting a panther rustling a few dry leaves in a jungle while stalking you, all the processing inside your brain is optimized for that.
But your, or anyone's hearing for that matter, is not an instrument. It's hardly repeatable or precise. Indeed, you are not only stricken with the problem of detection, but also memory, we are exceptionally bad at remembering a speakers volume just for 5 minutes and compare it to another volume, once the differences go below 3dB or so.
On top of that, we have all kinds of biases that bend and sometimes plainly overwrite what we hear. One of the strongest biases is sighted bias. If you see an amp that looks like a moldy potato but sounds really good and one that is diamond encrusted, but sounds just mediocre, you will almost always prefer the diamond one. I know you don't believe that, you think what you think you hear must be real, because it would mean you can't trust your hearing, so here is proof for sighted bias, the McGurk effect:
Getting aware of those limitations is a painful process all of us had to go through (not the young folk that started with the right data i guess). I bought the pricey cables in the 90ies and thought i could hear a difference. I bought the strange valve amps. I bought the hifi magazines and believed their crap. I painted the edges of my CDs with a sharpie.
What was i thinking? Not much apparently ;-)
Fact is, i was a fool back then, just like you are a fool today for believing you can hear differences in competently made DACs.
The pain you feel, going from one side of the argument to the other, is called cognitive dissonance.
Embrace it and come out on the other side with a larger understanding of your biological limitations.
It's not a valid opinion to be wrong. It's just wrong.
I bought a second Wiim Pro Plus today to feed my headphone amp.
I would like to have another one just to send my phono preamp output into another room.
The value on these things is off the chart.