Zwerg
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2013
- Posts
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I would consider myself a newbie to audio, and this has been bothering me after poor and dead cables. I started browsing around here to look for a USB Audio card to integrate into my cans and had to ask this.
Microchips and components are getting cheaper and cheaper. Can someone explain to me why we're in the 21st century and yet from device to headphones is an analogue signal? Why aren't cans with a built-in DAC the standard? The average device the average person will use processes sound as a digital signal. Most people do not need analogue capable headphones. So why are we still using an analogue signal across the worst possible cable-choice of any setup? A cable that will be under extra duress compared to most other cables and thus wear out faster. We've got dollar-store HDMI cables that can do full 1080 resolution video streaming, yet for our headphones we must have silver cables forged under a full moon with the blood of a virgin OR annoyingly oversized if we don't want to lose sound quality because it's still analogue. Why not the cheap, thick wiring between the integrated DAC and the actual speakers as an unflexable connection for the analogue signal, and then a digital signal over the exposed and abused cable to the device? No more extra worrying about damaging analogue cables, or even about the quality of the cable. If you don't like the standard DAC, replace it with a better one.
Microchips and components are getting cheaper and cheaper. Can someone explain to me why we're in the 21st century and yet from device to headphones is an analogue signal? Why aren't cans with a built-in DAC the standard? The average device the average person will use processes sound as a digital signal. Most people do not need analogue capable headphones. So why are we still using an analogue signal across the worst possible cable-choice of any setup? A cable that will be under extra duress compared to most other cables and thus wear out faster. We've got dollar-store HDMI cables that can do full 1080 resolution video streaming, yet for our headphones we must have silver cables forged under a full moon with the blood of a virgin OR annoyingly oversized if we don't want to lose sound quality because it's still analogue. Why not the cheap, thick wiring between the integrated DAC and the actual speakers as an unflexable connection for the analogue signal, and then a digital signal over the exposed and abused cable to the device? No more extra worrying about damaging analogue cables, or even about the quality of the cable. If you don't like the standard DAC, replace it with a better one.
