iMac onboard DAC vs. external?

[IA64]

Quote:

I did a little googling and determined that you are indeed talking about a mismatch with low impedance earphones. That isn't the fault of the DAC. It isn't even really the fault of the Mac any more than it is the earphones. Either select a headphone that matches well with the Mac, or use a headphone amp and the problems will be solved.
 
That's why I was completely confused by people saying that the Mac had bad sound. With my Sennheiser headphones, the output is pretty near perfect. When I amp it, I can crank it way up and it's extremely clean.

 
That doesn't mean that an external DAC doesn't add much.

 

[bigshot]

The DAC built into Mac products is comparable to stand alone DACs. Even if the standalone DAC had significantly better specs, it still wouldn't be audible, because the improvements would all lie beyond the range of human perception.
 
One of the truths I've found after a few decades in this hobby is that if you have a problem with your sound quality, it's best to 1) isolate the problem 2) identify its source and 3) attack the problem directly. I know a lot of people just keep upgrading randomly hoping that eventually the upgrades will make a difference, but I've never found that approach to be at all effective.
 
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

 

[IA64]

Quote:

The DAC built into Mac products is comparable to stand alone DACs. Even if the standalone DAC had significantly better specs, it still wouldn't be audible, because the improvements would all lie beyond the range of human perception.
 
One of the truths I've found after a few decades in this hobby is that if you have a problem with your sound quality, it's best to 1) isolate the problem 2) identify its source and 3) attack the problem directly. I know a lot of people just keep upgrading randomly hoping that eventually the upgrades will make a difference, but I've never found that approach to be at all effective.
 
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

 
The problem is that you don't know it's broken until you try something new.

 

[bigshot]

The way you find out is to take your headphones with you to other folks' houses and listen to the same recording on a variety of systems. If your system sounds worse than the rest, you need to get to work figuring out what's wrong.

Imagine if you decided you were going to have a mechanic put a new transmission in your car, even though you'd never had any problem with your transmission. Perhaps it might make you accellerate a little faster... But the odds are, if a transmission is broken, you would know about it, and replacing it randomly is a waste of money.

When digital audio is broken, it artifacts like crazy. It isn't a subtle thing. Even cheap modern DACs are capable of performing up to and beyond the limits of human hearing. Replacing a DAC without ever identifying anything wrong with the old one is a waste of money.

An iPod, iPhone or iMac is such a small, simple and elegantly designed thing, and its onboard sound quality is so high, I see absolutely no reason to junk it up by attaching more cables and battery operated boxes to do basically the same thing.

 

[IA64]

Quote:

The way you find out is to take your headphones with you to other folks' houses and listen to the same recording on a variety of systems. If your system sounds worse than the rest, you need to get to work figuring out what's wrong.

Imagine if you decided you were going to have a mechanic put a new transmission in your car, even though you'd never had any problem with your transmission. Perhaps it might make you accellerate a little faster... But the odds are, if a transmission is broken, you would know about it, and replacing it randomly is a waste of money.

When digital audio is broken, it artifacts like crazy. It isn't a subtle thing. Even cheap modern DACs are capable of performing up to and beyond the limits of human hearing. Replacing a DAC without ever identifying anything wrong with the old one is a waste of money.

An iPod, iPhone or iMac is such a small, simple and elegantly designed thing, and its onboard sound quality is so high, I see absolutely no reason to junk it up by attaching more cables and battery operated boxes to do basically the same thing.

 
Well the iMac onboard DAC is superior to its All-in-one desktop rivals but a $600 DAC definitely improves the performance. The issue is whether you notice it or not. I personally can't hear any difference between a 256-320kbps MP3 and a loseless audio format but some people do.
 
I tried both Shure SE535 and JH16 from analogue output of my Mac and a DAC definitely improved the sound by a big margin. 
 
Most noticeable difference was the Bass, more energetic, punchier and very well controlled. iMac onboard DAC doesn't do well with high sensitivity IEMs. Fortunately my DAC has two headphone output one for low and another one for high impedance phone.
 
The thing is that there isn't much you can do with desktop rigs. Your best bet is to bypass the sound card completely.
 
Heck, even bitperfect or Asio under Windows make a difference let alone the fact that you can play with the sampling rate the way you want with an external DAC.
 
My 2 cents. 

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

I tried both Shure SE535 and JH16 from analogue output of my Mac and a DAC definitely improved the sound by a big margin. 
 
Most noticeable difference was the Bass, more energetic, punchier and very well controlled. iMac onboard DAC doesn't do well with high sensitivity IEMs. Fortunately my DAC has two headphone output one for low and another one for high impedance phone.

 
You're attributing the difference in sound to the DAC, but it isn't the DAC. It's the headphone amp. You have an impedance mismatch with the particular earphones you're using. With other headphones, there would be no problem at all, and with your IEMs, a simple cmoy headphone amp would probably make the exact same improvement as completely bypassing the iMac's DAC.
 
The DACs in Macs sound just as good as standalone DACs. The specs for them extend beyond the range of human hearing. No need to replace a Mac's DAC.

 

[IA64]

Quote:

 
You're attributing the difference in sound to the DAC, but it isn't the DAC. It's the headphone amp. You have an impedance mismatch with the particular earphones you're using. With other headphones, there would be no problem at all, and with your IEMs, a simple cmoy headphone amp would probably make the exact same improvement as completely bypassing the iMac's DAC.
 
The DACs in Macs sound just as good as standalone DACs. The specs for them extend beyond the range of human hearing. No need to replace a Mac's DAC.

 
So the builtin in DAC in Mac sounds as good as the $1000 Dac1 ? 

 

[bigshot]

To human ears, yes. All of the improvements would be well beyond the range of human perception.

Here are the specifications for the DAC I'm pretty sure is in the iPod 5G...

http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/products/codecs/WM8758/

Note the signal to noise specs, The only way that a human would be able to hear that noise would be to turn the volume up to a level that hearing damage would certainly result. And this is in an inexpensive portable player.

Mac has always used top quality parts. Every single Mac product I've ever owned (and I have had dozens) has exactly the same sound... audibly perfect.

You can get better specs, but you can't hear them.

 

[TMRaven]

My old G5 iMac definitely doesn't sound like my current gen Apple products.  Its onboard audio was horrible-- complete with of bass rolloff and noise.  
 
The 118-119db sensitivity IEMs aren't fair arguments I think.  Even lots of high dollar 'audiophile' amplifiers suffer with a noise floor with said sensitive IEMs.  With every ordinary product I ran through the 2009 iMac and 2010 iPod Touch, there was no noise, and the sound was well balanced and clean-- even up to 106db Denon D2000.

 

[bigshot]

I produced commercial CDs on a G5. They still sound great.

 

[TMRaven]

They sound like ass compared to modern macs.

 

[bigshot]

It's interesting how this thread has mutated from all Macs have inferior sound to just old Macs have inferior sound.

My first Mac with audio in and out was an 8500 AV. I captured both video and sound with it and it sounded just like a CD. I can't remember what the headphone out was like, because I only used that to monitor, but I did thorough testing of the captures comparing the source to the capture (as I do on every machine I get) and it was as clean as a whistle. I still use a G4 and G5 and those require a capture box, but the sound there is perfect too.

 

[jaddie]

Quote:

They sound like ass compared to modern macs.

Unusual descriptive. Assuming we might guess what a modern mac sounds like, what does the other...oh, never mind.

 

[TMRaven]

Everything else might have been fine audio wise, but the headphone out of my G5 iMac was-- to use a massive understatement-- less than ideal.  

 

[bigshot]

A headphone amp would have probably fixed that problem. The soundcards in Macs are fine. It's just that different headphones react to headphone outputs differently.