The Terminator 15^th is priced at $6099 delivered to the U.S. The new and perhaps volatile import duties are the responsibility of the customer, though Denafrips say they expect these “will remain moderate”.

Overview

I’ve been testing a variety of digital-to-analog converters in the under $50,000 range. I know that is a big number, so I’ve covered products from under $1000 up to the exalted $50k level (although for exaltation reference, DACs go above $200k as of 2025). The point of our surveys like this is to be able to talk competently about what you get and don’t get at various price levels. Why spend money when you don’t have to? And similarly, saving money while reducing desired performance might be a false economy.

I found the Denafrips Terminator 15^th to be a very good DAC, certainly the best I’ve tested below $10,000. Its special sonic qualities are a deep soundstage and lively dynamics. If those terms seem like marketing BS, please check out our Audiopedia article on The Physics of Musical Reproduction to understand how these qualities are fundamental.

You definitely gain some sonic capabilities by stepping up from standard chip-based DACs to the Terminator. And, similarly, you can get somewhat better performance on certain sonic parameters than the Terminator offers, but so far in my testing, the price increase is substantial. So, the Terminator 15^th is an exceptional value if its strengths align with your needs. More on that shortly.

What Is the Issue?

Now why do we want to talk about high-end DACs at all? An important reminder, or maybe new information, is that significant sonic factors in music reproduction often involve “the six major issues of audio believability”. The problem of a-musical digital distortions is one of these six difficult to solve issues, and so is the focus of our DAC Series, which this review is part of. Because DAC distortions are a difficult engineering issue, they tend to get less attention than amplifier circuit and speaker refinements, but these digital issues are probably more important for making progress toward believability at this stage in the evolution of audio technology. Which is why we’ve drawn attention to them.

We also use a conceptual system to help with understanding. DAC distortions are in the upper left quadrant of our map of issue importance. These issues are subtle in an unusual sense: they are only triggered by certain signals. But when these distortions occur, they are fundamental distractions away from believability…if you know what real instruments sound like.

Unusual and unnatural sounds are distractions because they focus attention on the distortion and away from the music.

An example of a special digital distortion is something called ‘aliasing difference errors’. High frequency sounds can generate an artifact called an alias, which is a tone not present in the original music that is created when the sampling frequency is lower than needed to capture the musical signal. Filtering is used to reduce these artifacts, but certain non-linearities in the process can lead remaining very high frequency alias signals to be subtracted from one another and generate tones shifted into the upper midrange, e.g. 3-4kHz, where they are easily heard.

There are more such unnatural digital distortions.

I’m not an expert on digital processing and I’m not trying to turn you into one. I’m simply trying to point out some of the myriad ways that musical digital processing is not just 1’s and 0’s.

To put this in musical terms, many recordings heard today on digital have easily heard distortions if you are familiar with the sound of real instruments. Perhaps the best examples of this are the sounds of cymbals. A cymbal strike isn’t quite a perfect impulse, but its transient nature yields signals at very high frequencies. It is possible that these are above the frequency or near the frequency manageable by the sampling rate and thus are subject to “special” digital distortions as previously mentioned.

It doesn’t take long to find transients that on a lot of digital playback equipment sound odd and unnatural. And it isn’t just with cymbals but also voice and piano and wind instruments. You can become de-sensitized to these if you only listen to digital and never to live music or vinyl. But my experience is that you know something is wrong, regardless.

Sound Quality

Now let’s get to the real issue, which is the sound of the Denafrips Terminator.

Overall Balance

Normally, I don’t find frequency balance to be a big differentiator between DACs, but with the Terminator, I did. Which is why we listen and observe.

The Terminator places a slight but noticeable emphasis on treble transients and thus seems to have a slightly rising treble output as the music extends from the upper midrange into the treble. This is a small but meaningful effect.

I am not here to tell you what your preferences are (see our Methodology First Principles for more). I’m here to explain what products do. But I will say that many audiophiles say they are fighting an on-going battle with treble brightness and harshness. The apparent treble balance of the Terminator would thus not seem ideal for these listeners, but I think you would be wise to consider the other virtues of this DAC before drawing a conclusion. And as I will detail in a moment, low distortion DACs like this one have much more pleasing treble than what many audiophiles are fighting.

Treble Transient Unpacking

Now if you followed my technical mini-treatise, you will know that DAC treble distortion is often an issue. When DACs do treble distortion well, that is they avoid it, we get something called Treble Transient Unpacking.

What is treble transient unpacking? Well, let’s start with the distortion you often hear with digital playback. On cymbals for example, you will often hear something that sounds like a crash, even when you doubt that the cymbal is of that type or has been struck with big force. If you listen carefully, you will notice that even these crashes don’t sound right. They come across as more like a burst of noise, than a big cymbal hit. It sounds to me as if all the transients of the strike got jumbled in time, leading to something less like real instrumental output and more like unnatural noise.

The Denafrips Terminator “unpacks” what was previously noise. It becomes a transient followed by ringing and shimmer. The transient isn’t over-spiked and the decay is spread out like the real thing. The transient is often followed by notable tones and waves of tones and different types of tones, not by grit, undifferentiated except by level.

Now to put this in context, the Terminator is not the best I have heard at treble transient unpacking. But thus far in my tests you have to pay more, perhaps substantially more, to get slightly better results.

Note that these results came using the Terminator with very good streamers. Streaming makes surprising and obvious differences in DAC sound quality.

Soundstage Width and Depth

Soundstaging with the Terminator is excellent. The exceptional quality here is the depth of images which extend farther toward the wall behind the speakers than on all but the DACs at 5X or greater price that I’ve tried. This excellent depth is accompanied by natural performer placement that helps get the image off the speakers.

And, sorry to say, I have to note that the high-end streamers I used enhanced this phenomenon.

Transient Response

Another feature of the Terminator is a generally quick and lively sound. The leading edge of notes is very well rendered, but it doesn’t sound edgy or brittle or distorted. With reference to the absolute sound, it seems more natural and real, and I was surprised and impressed. But, I admit, some may not like this level of excitement in certain types of music.

Tonal Density

The Terminator has tonal density that is good, but not equal to DACs at much higher prices. This is in the domain we can call ‘continuousness’ which is simply the positive aspect of a lack of grain. My notes suggest that the Terminator frequently has a slightly noticeable grain structure. However, I think if you are coming from a lower-priced DAC you are likely to view the Terminator as better than acceptable here.

Organicness

My final parameter for DAC evaluation can be called ‘organicness’. There is a lot of research in A/D and D/A conversion suggesting that timing errors, and not just jitter but also interpolation errors, are a factor in perceived sound quality. I have spent some time listening to time-corrected vs standard conversion techniques in an effort to explain what work on this dimension sounds like. I’ve landed on the term ‘organicness’ mainly to indicate that time-managed digital signals and digital conversions sound more natural and relaxed and whole, yielding detail without edginess. Add to that the equally important idea that instruments sound right, not processed. If your reference is the absolute sound, and you have experience with real instruments, you can notice this right away. It is a bit hard to separate this quality from the tonal balance I discussed at first, but I think many listeners will find the Terminator to be natural and relaxed sounding.

I think the Terminator is better at organicness than many other DACs. If the treble balance isn’t a matching problem with the rest of your system, I think a charming aspect of the Terminator is that the sound quality elements are coherent, meaning that they hang together in a way that isn’t distracting. In fact, the big soundstage, clarity and dynamism are highly involving and encourage continued exploration of your library.

Subjective Coda

Some viewers have struggled with all of this objective, somewhat analytical detail. Admittedly, to make sense of this, you will want to have some experience with real music and some experience with what it means to have or not have certain characteristics. I think those are good things to study. Still, I can see that some people want something additional related to my feelings about this DAC. With the caveat that this is necessarily subjective, I’ll say that I liked the Denafrips Terminator 15th quite a bit. I very much enjoy a detailed and open presentation because it is involving and insightful and, for me, low distraction. Consider the new recording of the Mozart Symphony No. 41 with Ensemble Appassionato under Mathieu Herzog. It shows much of what we have been talking about, and I found the results thrilling: the dynamics are brilliantly punchy, the violins sound super clear but a bit grainy, and the soundstage is wonderful.

At this price point, the Terminator seems amazingly involving and alive. I like that.

The Design

You should know that Denafrips has a long list of features embedded in the Terminator.  First of all, ladder DACs are hard to do well, with impressively high precision required. Using a balanced design makes this, roughly, twice as hard. There are many other details, like shielded linear power supplies, special clocks and high-quality components. I don’t mean to give this short shrift, but most of us have limited ability to reason from a bevy of features to sound quality.

That said, I do want to note the correlation so far in my testing between good ladder designs and reduction of typical DAC distortions. This isn’t to say that all ladder DACs do this, but so far the Denafrips, the MSB and the Tidal have this feature in common and do very well on this particular issue. Other (non-ladder) designs can succeed here too, but it seems to require special design talent.

Other details that some will be concerned with include a switch on the Terminator to enable Non-Oversampling Mode. The Denafrips also allows for USB, I2S and AES inputs. The I2S input will be of interest to some, given theories about its superiority. Of course, I2S isn’t standardized, so this is a bit of a challenge. I have two new streamers coming, one under development by Denafrips, that feature I2S outputs, so I hope to test this soon.

Summary

The Denafrips Terminator 15th is an excellent DAC. It has a sound competitive with very high-end DACs, but without the full high-end price. It sounds different from other excellent DACs in the next price range up, but that difference is sometimes to the advantage of the Terminator. I think these differences will be appealing to a group of listeners who want the sense of maximum transparency to the source. This is an exciting DAC.