boots n cats
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2015
- Posts
- 15
- Likes
- 10
My level of audiophile listening skills is this: If I'm wearing headphones, I can tell the difference between 128 kbps and 320 kbps mp3 played back to back if I'm listening reaaaally intently. That's it. Almost all my music is in 320 mp3 or 256 aac and I've never felt the need to have any of it in lossless quality.
I'm new to the world of external DACs and lately I've been trying to get a cheap, working DAC to see what it's all about. I've bought a couple optical DACs but it turns out something's wrong with my computer and it won't send the data out optically, so I returned those DACs. This is why I'm specifically looking for a USB DAC. I once bought a Sabre USB DAC but it was making a weird kind of distortion and it seemed like there might have been more background noise too so I returned it. (Maybe I just got a bad one, I dunno.)
Basically, I'm just looking for a cheap USB DAC to buy just so I can see if the world of external DACs is a world I want to get into. I don't want to spend more than 80 bucks on it. Ideally I'd want to spend less than 60 bucks. Even more ideally I'd like to spend less than 30 bucks, but I want to be confident that the DAC is an improvement over my internal one. I also just want a DAC and not an amp because my speakers have a built-in amp. I'm also totally fine with losing the volume control on my computer if I have to.
Other info that might be helpful:
This is for a macbook pro that's 5 years old.
I connect it to A5+ speakers connected to an M8 sub.
Thanks!
I'm new to the world of external DACs and lately I've been trying to get a cheap, working DAC to see what it's all about. I've bought a couple optical DACs but it turns out something's wrong with my computer and it won't send the data out optically, so I returned those DACs. This is why I'm specifically looking for a USB DAC. I once bought a Sabre USB DAC but it was making a weird kind of distortion and it seemed like there might have been more background noise too so I returned it. (Maybe I just got a bad one, I dunno.)
Basically, I'm just looking for a cheap USB DAC to buy just so I can see if the world of external DACs is a world I want to get into. I don't want to spend more than 80 bucks on it. Ideally I'd want to spend less than 60 bucks. Even more ideally I'd like to spend less than 30 bucks, but I want to be confident that the DAC is an improvement over my internal one. I also just want a DAC and not an amp because my speakers have a built-in amp. I'm also totally fine with losing the volume control on my computer if I have to.
Other info that might be helpful:
This is for a macbook pro that's 5 years old.
I connect it to A5+ speakers connected to an M8 sub.
Thanks!