[DatGameh]

So, some time in the future, I am planning to buy a DAP.
One of the choices is the Crazier R3 (I've done research; it's not too bad) and the other is the Hidizs AP60 II.

Originally, I wanted to get the Crazier due to it's low price, over the top battery life, and the praise that its predicessor (Nintaus X10) recieved. But, then I found the Hidizs, which had a lot more features at "just" twice the price (normally, you'd get similar features at thrice the price) and also their much more recognized brand compared to "Crazier".

But what got me to choose the Hidizs was it's superior DAC.

The Crazier uses a Cirrus Logic DAC from 2012, while the Hidizs uses a Asahi Kasei DAC from 2015. Besides age, both DACs are from different tiers (i.e. the AKM chip is higher end).

Right before I purchased it, I realized: I don't even listen to music above 16-bit. Not because of memory constraints, but because the kind of music I listen to is never mastered in 24-bits and more.

So this brings me to the question: does pairing 16-bit music with a high-res DAC make any difference to the audio quality in any way?

 

[lantian]

Many will probably disagree with me here, but in my opinion it does make all the difference when it comes to proper reproduction, lower end dacs simply can not reproduce all the content in the music no matter how good their implementation is.
A lower end dac can sound "better"(it will not reproduce the audio correctly but will sound good doing it) but never as good as the flagship dac, which are the only ones that can take whole source signal and make a pretty accurate reproduction of it. It is still up to rest of the system to make sure it sounds as good as it can, but it will give more of your music(paint a accurate image with all the proper sounds). Just my thoughts from my experience so far