Dacs matter more the higher up in headphones and amps you go. With a $500 setup sure the differences will be smaller but with a TOTL setup they make a substantial difference and the differences are much easier to discern.
Here are two recent double blind ABX tests of the 3 Schiit Yggy Models by audio reviewers.
I have also done double blind ABX tests of DACs and its very easy to tell the difference between DACs. I would assume the rest of your gear would need to be good enough to help discern the differences, but also not really... it is pretty obvious for the most part.
And its up to you to decide if its worth it for you to buy a DAC or not, but there is no denying that DACs use different technologies, measure differently, and sound different.
I would assume the rest of your gear would need to be good enough to help discern the differences, but also not really... it is pretty obvious for the most part.
It means that your downstream components have achieved a required transparency level to hear a difference. Downstream components are important. Take by example a good R2R DAC and feed your headphones with nested loopback HPA like THX789 or Topping new series. While these amps work well with Delta-Sigma, where sound is already noise shaped and smoothed out, such combination is not good for R2R decoder, especially in NOS mode. Now it comes to the source material. If your music of choice carries natural properties of instruments you may still hear differences but your evaluation of a DAC will be fundamentally flawed. For EDM music type in the same situation all DACs may sound the same.
Dacs matter more the higher up in headphones and amps you go. With a $500 setup sure the differences will be smaller but with a TOTL setup they make a substantial difference and the differences are much easier to discern.
I shall eat my words. Just changed DACs and wow. The new Dac is a big upgrade. The sound is preferable over direct USB than I2S ( via Singxer su-1) as well.
I shall eat my words. Just changed DACs and wow. The new Dac is a big upgrade. The sound is preferable over direct USB than I2S ( via Singxer su-1) as well.
Dac filter or digital filter is a thing of process inside the dac.
So, a dac is fixed filter A and a dac with selectable filter, or fixed filter B will sounds not the same.
I would add that you don’t even have to go all the way up the high end chain to hear a difference. I upgraded my pc source dac to a schiit modi and could tell an audible difference. Then I upgraded to a bifrost 2 and still heard audible improvements I found worth the money. The big reveal for me was living with the bifrost for a while and then trying out a lower end dac just to see if I could hear a difference and after being used to the bifrost sound, losing it was even more dramatic than getting it in the first place.
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