carmatic
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2008
- Posts
- 473
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- 52
I don't share that sentiment because it doesn't always play out in reality -- sometimes, or for certain types of music, one may find the softness introduced by this extra A/D conversion favorable.
that is subjective, but objectively the integrity of the signal is always more degraded the more things you have happening to it
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Also you're just moving the DAC from within the device to within the headphone, the words pot, kettle, black come to mind. What's to say one DAC will definitely be significantly better than the other in daily use?
one only needs to see the myriad of posts asking about headphone/amp combos to see that its not just about a 'better' DAC, but having a complete package where the headphones are matched to the circuitry
and in the case of the qc20's , this specifically means avoiding the use of 2 DAC's one after another
Huawei is already selling a pair of ANC earphones that charge from two of their smartphones..one of them being the Mate 7 I believe? And Apple's created an entire spec for headphones to do exactly what you want via the lightning port. JBL may have in fact launched the product you want at CES this year and then backtracked. But you know what, A) I'd rather keep that port free for charging, B) I don't believe most headphones would use a DAC chip that beats the device's performance by a wide margin, and C) all of this is just really really gimmicky, more than it needs to be.
i used to own a Sony Xperia Z3 and their NC31EM noise cancellers which ran off the noise cancelling circuitry built into the phone, and they were kind of mediocre - those earbuds were what i would call a mere gimmick of that phone
what do you mean 'keep that port free for charging' , it is USB so it can send both data and power, and being a pure DAC it would dispense with the battery altogether... you could replace the switch with the volume control
and specifically pertaining to the qc20 , it has a DAC already anyway so why not feed it the raw digital input?