Well I think the DACs (by which I mean the chips) to do the job probably already exist, they just don't get engineered correctly and marketed optimally so don't reach customers' hands. If I didn't hold out the hope that digital could beat analog then I'd not be doing what I'm doing here. I guess I like a really big challenge but also none of the arguments of the analog lovers about what's wrong with digital make sense to me, so I can't see a fundamental problem with digital per se, as a technology. Its just the implementations which suck.
As regards what's missing - its what digital adds which is the problem, not what it takes away.
That is interesting...so you believe the fundamental pieces of digital are now here at our disposal (well yours actually) to beat analog playback...and the key is implementing it properly to achieve the inherent potential of the existing fundamental pieces. And the key focus is on eliminating the problems that digital ADDS to playback. So if intermodulation noise, maybe on the margin phase shifting, can be solved we are largely there?