This is a review and detailed measurements of the PS Audio NuWave DAC. It is on kind loan from a member. Looks like the NuWave DAC came out back in 2012 and it is now discontinued. The original cost was US $999. Strangely, I found two of them used on ebay selling for US $1,500! So the price has gone up since release.From feel and heft point of view, the NuWave leaves a positive impression:You can't tell from this picture due compression of the image using my 100 mm macro lens. In reality, it is a very deep unit, twice as deep as a typical desktop DAC.The top is high gloss and picks up fingerprint oil instantly.There are only two switches on the front: one controls the input and the other, forces a resample to 192 kHz or not. I performed all my testing in "Native" mode which doesn't resample. PS Audio manual recommends this mode. I was there were indicators for sample rate in the front panel.I am not going to bore you with a picture of the back. Suffice it to say that it has XLR and RCA outputs which is quite nice and usual trio of USB, Toslink and Coax inputs.AC power supply is built in and from the feel of the unit, it must be an oversized one.Overall, the NuWave DAC leaves a fine impression.I was pleased to see the XLR output to provide a high output of 5.4 volts. In fairness to it, I lowered the input digital signal by 2 dB to get it closer to 4 volt nominal output. This improved performance about 1 dB:Distortion products are clearly visible and set the SINAD (signal to noise and distortion). PS Audio talks about discrete output stages so perhaps that is the cause of rather high distortion. As it is, the NuWave DAC lands in the third and "OK" bucket of some 175 DACs measured:That may be depressing until you consider that the NuWave betters the performance of the current PS Audio DS DAC by some 20 dB!Noise performance was very good and hence the reason it did not impact SINAD:The above predicts that we can't get to -120 dB limit of our linearity test and indeed, that is what happens:Still, that is respectable performance.Intermodulation distortion versus level was disappointing as we approached full output:That analog output is again the likely source of distortion as even cheap DACs do better than this.For the rest of the graph, performance is good as helped by the low noise of the unit.Multitone shows the effect of distortion products in the extreme:This is not a good showing. And neither is THD+N versus frequency:Frequency response had some oddities:Not an issue for us older folks but younger people may be missing out on a bit of high frequency extension.Filter response is typical of what we see in IC DACs:Instead of rolling off at 22.05 kHz as required by theory, they take their time and do so at 24 kHz.Jitter analysis showed good bit of extra stuff we like to not see:It was the first time I have seen that exponential rise in low frequency noise which indicates random noise.As a general DAC, the PS Audio NuWave is disappointing as you can get a number of audio DACs at a fraction of its price that outperform it. So obviously nothing I would recommend. It is however instructive to compare it to the newer DACs from PS Audio. Only in high-end audio does a company go so far backward by both increasing the price of a DAC to whopping $6000, while have it perform far worse on both distortion and noise (PS Audio DirectStream DAC).Imagine if Porsche produced a new model now that was 6 times more expensive than what they offered back in 2012, yet it was much slower and handled worse! Yet that is the reality we deal with in high-end audio. People are sold on fantasies and unproven proposals rather than cold hard facts. Only then can you convince them to buy inferior DACs for a lot more money.------------As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.Just had our very long driveway paved. Man that was expensive. I feel so poor now and could use a chunk of new cash to get over it. So please considerusing: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/