Do DACs/Amps matter?

Technical Discussion
21

I’m replying to your original post (#1) as I have my own take. My assessments follow differences in fatigue over long listening sessions. Several years ago I visited ASR regularly, but stopped upon losing faith in his methods and the general lack of relevance of his data. Once SINAD passes human perceptual thresholds, who cares?

My take is: regardless of measurements, some setups make my ears hiss or ring. Bad setups give me literal headaches. Some setups do this in a few seconds (e.g., Grado or Sennheiser out of a budget Cirrus Logic DAC). Other setups allow comfortable listening all day. Some Delta Sigma DACs that I’ve owned or demoed (i.e., AKM, ESS chipsets) have tight, bright treble and thereby emphasize small details over the music as a whole. They often give me headaches.

Fatigue is so central to my system analyses that I created a playlist that ramps up the problems through 50 tracks over 3 hours:

My Bifrost 2 and ZenDAC don’t give me headaches, and boosted the performance of every amp versus my older AKM daily driver DAC. Switching to uncompressed sources greatly reduced perceived hiss and allowed me to listen for longer with more comfort. Now, some heavily compressed source material causes headaches while uncompressed do not (e.g., same song on Amazon HD versus mediocre Youtube music).

The commonly cited electrical measurement data plus ABX testing is wrongheaded, wrongheaded, wrongheaded. Humans are animals with a performance envelope – focus on perceptual characteristics and limits. This is science.

ABX testing is akin to walking back and forth from a bright snowy day into a dark room and back out. Your brain gets slammed by the new test system and you couldn’t hear the differences due to biological overload. BUT, long duration fatigue is a reliable indicator of whether a system is minimally adequate and tolerable. AFTER you pass the potential fatigue point and habituate comfortably (e.g., 1+ hour), you can start to assess the qualities of a particular setup. Before that you are wasting you time by shocking your nerves and brain.

With experience I’ve shifted from being a “transducers first” to a “start from the source” person. Every stage will be ruined by bad upstream content or processing. Synergy is real, trial and error is necessary, and your body will change over minutes, hours, and days. Cost is becoming less and less important, as audio is an extremely mature industry. We are all just tweaking the margins. After fatigue it boils down to personal preferences, hearing sensitivities, hearing loss, and mood.

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22

I guess this is also dependent upon the person.

I find it easier to identify differences by A/B testing over short durations than long periods.

I suppose it could be due to habit. When mixing FOH at a live show, I certainly couldn’t wait for an hour before making adjustments :wink:

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23

Yeah, pro vs audiophile….glaring problems are easy to identify for sure

24

I find both methods extremely useful and necessary. Short comparisons allow me to identify the most glaring flaws and obvious differences, while long term listening sessions reveal more subtiles and system synergy.

@generic’s fatigue testing methodology is something I subscribe to as well. That particular testing method is what helped me move on from my previous headphones and amp, as I realized I was always fatigued after an hour or so of listening. Highly recommended!

A long, fatigue-free listening comparison session is like listening to an album over and over again after the first initial listen; the latter made you realize you’re going to enjoy it, but only the former reveals all the intricacies and nuances and how much you truly enjoy it.

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25

I like the idea of fatigue as a measure but can’t subscribe to that fully as I think the mental and physiological state you start a session would affect your ability to sustain more fatiguing systems (there’s also a discussion around some use of substances but that’s for another day).

But to the point, if you think about fatigue over long term ownership of gear and not a single session, that combined with “listening for the differences” allows you to really understand what you like or don’t like in a system or comparing a coupe until eventually being able to identify the difference.

tl;dr long term AB can work for me and fatigue over time can be a factor for preferring system A over B.

Still stand by previous point that experience budget and synergy matter a lot

26

I find AB (I don’t ABX) comparison invaluable when comparing two similar audible characteristics of a piece of gear. If I need to compare and explain to someone why I think that A is better than B even though it might be close. In this case, AB comparisons are a must. I do this often. Tubes, amps, DACs, headphones. Very useful for this.

However, when I have already pieced together a system that I feel has synergy and I am comparing it to another system that has synergy, then I feel that AB comparisons are a detriment. This is when I find it much better just relax and enjoy long sessions with each system in order to find why one pleases me the more than the other and to what degree.

Real world example, my ZMF Aeolus/ RSA HR-2 system vs. my Hifiman HE6se V2/RebelAmp system. When AB comparisons are made between these two, the HE6se technicalities are shocking like stepping into the bright snowy day as you put it. The ZMF Aeolus in this AB comparison on the other hand comes off dull like stepping into a dark room as you put it. However, when I sit down to longer sessions without AB comparison, the ZMF Aeolus system is the pinnacle achievement of synergy from all of my gear.

27

I agree totally.

When reviewing something, I like to use it almost exclusively for 4 or 5 days (usually at my desk at work) before doing any kind of comparisons or even focusing too much on the product. This period will sometimes reveal things that I don’t like and weren’t apparent on first listen, other times it’s the opposite, things I didn’t like on first listen sometimes grow on me.

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28

Very well put, especially the last paragraph.

29

Thats interesting. I find myself needing to aclimate to pieces of gear (especially dacs) before I can fully tease out every and all differences. I tend to use a piece exclusively for a week and then go onto abx the next once I have reached aclimation

rofl. Should have read further before replying

30

Actually, reading both my posts in the same post makes them seem quite contradictive to each other.

What I am referring to is that when I AB something to specifically note differences, I do it with short intervals, maybe even half a song back and forth (I also like to use certain instrumental loops).

But yes, I do this after spending time to just see how I get on with something in general.

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32

As someone who has reached end game, if I were to do it all again I would’ve stopped at the GSX-mini. I stuck with one dac and I have no need to try others. I started with the best transducer I could afford and chose not to bother with many due to cost and space constraints and just the hassle. Curiosity got me though and I am not going back, but I wouldn’t mind going to a less costly chain if I had to. All three amps I went through from the mini to iCan Signature to Oor/Hypsos were good enough, similar sounding and powerful enough to drive the LCD5’s with no huge difference. Diminishing returns is real. There were subtle differences, but I can’t say positively as the conditions weren’t controlled. I think a lot of what people experience is just them justifying their purchase. I have learned to take subjective comparisons with a huge grain of salt.
That said, there is nothing I feel I need to change any more. I have never listened to so much music I would have never listened to before after incorporating Mitchco’s convolution filters. I wish these were available a lot sooner.

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33

Well the gsx mini is in my mind the best pairing possible with LCD-5 money no object so I can see why you feel like that

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34

I’d be in this camp. I have heard transducers or EQ being able to “fix” a poorly mixed/mastered track, but I wasn’t able to hear the opposite to date, i.e., a transducer screwing up a good track. Thank god. :joy:

Another camp I am typically involved with is the “mood camp”. There are those days that everything sounds like :poop:, independent of the transducer. :smile:

If I may tease the question in the title to be split in two, i.e., “Do DACs/Amps matter for …”:

  1. Lossy material? E.g.: YT Music, Spotify (standard) and similar…;
  2. Lossless material? E.g.: Qobuz, FLAC, etc…

The question I have been failing to find an answer online is the first one btw, i.e., “Do DACs/Amps matter for lossy music?”

Great hint. That would probably be a good thread for the folks still looking for the “pot of gold”… :wink:

Cheers.

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35

alright we’re getting into semantics now… you get my point and you know that ish cans won’t scale with amps and better quality dacs. Hell at a certain point the dac makes a bigger difference than the amp does when you scale to a certain $ threshold.

36

Oh, i was 100% being pedantic. Im just a big tire fanatic

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37

To your DAC, and hence everything else down the chain until your ears, there is no difference between lossy or lossless music. There is literally no bit of data in lossless music that is more or less valid than any bit of data in lossy music. Given a lossless original and a lossy derivative, your DAC cannot distinguish between which one is the original and which one is the alteration, just as a TV has no idea if the color #ff0302 is the “original” or #ff0301 is the deviation, or vice-versa. It just renders the color.

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38

To pull it back from random tangents about TVs and cars, I think based on the responses to this thread, DAC and Amps do matter. The degree to which they matter seems to be in question.

I think most of us are in the 2 - 3 category and even if you sit firmly in the 1 category, the fact that people encourage to find the cleanest dac/amp means that they do matter because a “dirty” dac/amp will sound different or “worse”. So I guess falling in any of the categories actually means DAC/Amps do matter.

One thing I find interesting is that it seems to be quite easy to describe differences between headphones i.e. warm or dark or bright etc etc but nobody really talks about the differences that dac/amps bring. Yes, they won’t change the FR significantly but there are some things that aren’t quite as evident when looking at a FR chart.

In my experience, a good dac and amp will improve these areas of the musical experience - wider and deeper soundstage, separation, sharper or blunter transients, quicker or slower decay, bass slam, decrease in what we consider “digititus” or treble glare, and lastly dynamics.

Many of these can be inherent to a particular headphone like possibly a wide soundstage with the HD800 but soundstage can also be increased depending on what the HD800 is hooked up to. Something like bass slam is very dependent on the source gear IME. Examples would be Susvara or Stealth. Both are not really considered bass slammy headphones. However, when hooked up to a high current amplifier like the AHB2, the bass dynamic and impactful, not limp or weak.

Many of us also believe in synergy. Well if synergy is real, then DAC/amps can make a huge difference to a headphone. If we pair a warm headphone with a warm dac/amp, you might experience a “muddy” sound or a “veiled” sound. This is due to the lack of treble to balance the tonality of the source and headphones. The idea of synergy and component matching isn’t a new idea. This has been very consistent in the speaker world but for some reason headphone enthusiasts feel like we need to figure all this stuff out on our own. Nobody tries to pair a 2a3 set amp with a hard to drive bookshelf speaker in a large room. Nobody tries to pair a tube amp with magnepan speakers. No need to listen to me when ABA describes it much better. Once you’ve narrowed down your transducer, it’s all about synergy.

So while I understand the importance of a DAC or amp might change depending on your journey, for those who have been on this journey for a while now, we’ve discovered that DAC and amps do matter. So if they matter at the end of the journey, they also matter at the beginning of the journey. Generally dynamics work better with tubes and planars work better with SS. I think that should be pretty obvious. A person who buys a 6xx with a schiit stack will have a different experience than if they paired the 6xx with a crack. Maybe the real issue is that headphones are limiting when it comes to how much effect the DAC/Amp have because I’ve heard many times that differences between source components are easier to hear when you test on speakers. If you can’t hear a difference between different DACs/Amps, there are a handful of reasons that I can think of.

  1. Their topologies or technologies or goals are the same. They’re looking to have the least distortion by implementing feedback in one way or another. This is especially true in lower end gear where there are major compromises when designing gear due to cost.

  2. Your transducer cannot resolve the differences between the gear.

  3. You’re not sure what you should be listening for when trying to evaluate different gear.

  4. The music you are listening to does not demonstrate the differences well (i.e. music with poor dynamic range won’t showcase a headphone or source gear with good dynamics)

  5. All audiophiles are delusional and there are really no differences to be heard.

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39

We all have to remember which community you ask this question to has the biggest factor in what answers you’ll get. Could be an interesting comparison but I think all of us know how it’s going to end.

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40

I don’t think anyone in this particular forum thinks DACs and amps don’t make a difference or help achieve synergy; this community is not ASR. :slight_smile: It’s more of a question of, how much difference does it make, and does it make more sense to simply get better headphones (a true change in FR) vs continuing to dump money into the amp and DAC? That’s where you’re going to find the biggest divide in opinions.

Yes, I said opinions, because there isn’t a definitive way - this hobby is too subjective

This is so true it’s not even funny. I’m glad someone pointed it out.

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41

While we’re not hardcore objectivists or subjectivists in there, there are people here who have a difference of opinion that can’t be reconciled. Some people sit very firmly in each camp and don’t really deviate. Either they matter or they don’t. Depending on which one you subscribe to, you path could vary greatly compared to another person’s.