Do I need a DAC?

[Christian Sunderland]

Hello,

I'm getting a bit confused over to use a DAC (or not)?

My Brennan B2 is connected to a Denon AVR-250XBT (a decent but not overtly expensive receiver) via HDMI.  The connection is about 50cm apart, so no interference and optical connection not required (although no issue to use one).

I usually play the Brennan through the Denon setting for multiple-channel stereo (The Denon is set up as 5.1 Surround including a sub-woofer).

It sounds good as it is, so my question is:

Will a DAC and optical connection improve the quality of sound?

Many Thanks,

Christian  

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Are you happy with your current setup and how it works/sounds?

If so then no you do not need a DAC.

If it a'nt broke don't fix it.

Fred

[Daniel Taylor]

You are actually using the DAC inside your Denon AVR.  That is probably significantly higher quality than the one in the B2.  I have a similar setup with my Onkyo receiver, and I'm quite happy with it.  

Depending on what speakers you have, upgrading to a better set of speakers would probably provide a much bigger improvement in sound quality compared to adding an external DAC.  That's certainly true in my case, where my next upgrade will almost certainly be newer, better speakers.

[Christian Sunderland]

I am actually using a set of 5.1 Mission stack speakers (bought from a charity shop for a very reasonable price of £30!). - So, there's no point upgrading anything?

Christian   

[Daniel Taylor]

The question remains:  Are you happy with the sound?  If not, in what way could it be improved?

[Daniel Taylor]

I just found this message in my private email.  It's over six hours old now:

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 Well, my question is, can it be improved more??

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Well, Christian, I'm sure that adding an external DAC of sufficient quality would have the potential to improve the sound more.  The problem then would be, does the rest of your system have the resolving power to reveal it, and do you have the golden ears to hear it?  I understand that there are those who can hear subtle differences in various pieces of audio equipment.  I can hear some myself.  But at some point, you have to ask yourself if the sound is good enough, and switch from listening to the sound of the equipment, and focus on the music.  These are subjective questions that only you can answer.  I wish you luck.

[Mark Fishman]

I remember once upon a time going into a hi-fi specialist shop to listen to and possiblly buy some new equipment (speakers included). They asked me what my budget was; I said US$5000 (that was then; in current shrunken money that would probably be equivalent to about US$50,000). Their response was, "If that's all, don't spend it on hifi gear, go buy concert tickets."

Quite frankly, recorded and reproduced music simply cannot sound 100% like the live or original event (assuming there could possibly be a live original event, and it's not an electronic artifact that never existed outside the mixing panel). You can get to about 90% quite easily, and even cheaply nowadays, and trying to get closer quickly runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars with no hope of complete success. And that's discounting the fact that current recording and mastering aspproaches deliberately distort the natural sound for commercial reasons.

There's an old joke about an audiophile who meets a psychoacoustician and asks if that's one word or two...

There's also the fact that performing musicians usually have quite modest playback equipment, because they know what things actually sound like, and a hint is enough to let their imagination do the real work.

Daniel is right: at some point you need to listen to the music instead of the equipment. Is it good enough to let you enjoy the performance? Most of your emotional reaction is down to mood, environment, and psychology, and will vary day to day anyway.

I'll close with Peter Walker's comment (he's the founder of Quad Electroacoustics): if you can hear a difference between properly operating amplifiers within their power limits, then you're not old enough.

Cheers -- m.

[Davywhizz]

An interesting thread with very helpful contributions. I was a performing musician for most of my life, though generally alongside another career as I got older. Mark is right, most of us prefer to spend money on our own sound than on hifi. The pandemic turned an intentional break in performing into what is probably now a retirement for me and I started ripping my CDs to a B2 in March 2020. Since then, I've built a very nice hifi, but tried to keep the spending "sensible".  Others in my house may not agree.

On Mark's point about live performances: it's one of the ironies of being a musician that, in most forms of music, the audience gets by far the best deal. On-stage, it's mostly about ensuring people can hear themselves and preventing screeching feedback. Even if everyone has in-ear monitors, it's about giving the singers, in particular, a mix in which their own voice is key.

These are some of the things I've learned about hifi, based on my particular perspective:

There's at least as much nonsense talked about audio as there is about musical instruments and amplification. And that's a lot of snake oil.

The biggest influences on how you hear your music are how well the original recording was put together, mixed and mastered, the room you are listening in and then your speakers. But, to a lesser extent, the whole system needs to be balanced, as it can only be as good as the weakest link.

Unless you have the luxury of a dedicated listening room, you are probably wasting your time, and potentially huge amounts of money, squeezing the final few percentage points of supposed quality out of a hifi system. Even then, you will never hear anything better than what was in the original recording. It's surprising how poor some are.

That said, I took a decision that the minimum audio quality I would use is CD level. I was finding Spotify streaming at its highest level (320 kbps) could be  enjoyable and entertaining, but there was still something missing. Before deciding, I assembled a number of albums I knew in detail over many years and listened at length to them all at 320kbps, on CD and as higher resolution files (though only up to 24 bit/192kHz). I found I can still hear the difference, and I enjoy the finer details. I like to think I'm listening to the music, not the equipment, as Daniel puts it. But the geeky part of my enjoyment is based on something Mark said: I know what real instruments and voices should sound like and I want some of that. So sometimes I'm appreciating the accuracy of the transients in the cymbal sounds, or how a piece of percussion in the back of the mix cuts through, or how a singer breathes...rather than just listening to the whole piece.

A DAC can be a wonderful thing, and it's important to understand it's not only about the level of detail it reveals. For me, the most important attribute of any DAC is the timing, because that determines the rhythm of what you hear. Assembling all that digital data, converting it to analogue and getting it all to your ears at exactly the right time, in the right order, is amazing when you think about it. You can listen to the same piece of music on two different devices and one will make you tap your foot (or however you get your groove on) and the other will leave you, literally, unmoved. That's timing. A DAC is also about the width and depth of how you perceive what you are hearing and the separation and stereo placement of instruments and voices. Thirdly, it's obvious but worth saying, a DAC has two sides to it, the digital side and the analogue output. Both are important. A good DAC, for example, will ensure that the analogue stereo channels are equally matched in terms of volume. Finally, even the power supply of a DAC can affect the listening experience, primarily in how well it removes or prevents any extraneous electrical interference.  I've also found that some DACs sound more clinical and some are more musical. I have no idea why or how, or if I like to imagine it, but I have one that simply sounds, to me, as it should. And that's good enough.

[Mark Fishman]

Davywhizz,

Very nice exposition of where problems might lie, and what can matter to you when listening to recorded music. Thanks.

Over the years, I've known a number of engineers of varying abilities and specialties. All of them have agreed that once you handle timing jitter in the data stream -- hint: good clocks and buffers help -- and carefully adjust the voltage steps in the DAC for linearity, the remaining source of sometimes enormous differences in sonic quality will be in the analog output stages, and usually in the grounding employed in the analog circuits and power supplies. "Proper grounding is a black art," I was told.

That's probably why some equipment benefits from power conditioning on the AC line. If the circuits had proper grounding, noise in the AC line wouldn't make it past the power supplies, and the grounds for the power, analog audio, and digital clocking would all be separated. You shouldn't have to spend extra for good design, just for better parts.

Cheers -- m.