Please Educate Me

I think a lot of audiophiles who obsess over DACs are old timers who are used to having to do that with their old vinyl rigs, which are MUCH HARDER to get right.

Most companies have D2A conversion down pretty well. Little for an audiophile to do other than choose a DAC for whatever reason they choose. Most are very good. DAC technology is much more reliable and robust than phono. Not hard to find a good DAC and just enjoy the music unlike phono rigs which require a lot of expertise and time to get set up optimally. I think this is a big reason many audiophiles tend to poo poo digital still.  10 years ago I could see the point.  Not today though.   They blame it on the sound but its really that a phono setup is a much better toy to play with for those so inclined or merely they are old school and used to that being a thing.

OR here that they got phono gear to sell...

It’s an imperfect world. People should not feel constrained in how they conduct a legitimate quest to learn.  Nobody is obligated to reply.

Good manners always apply.

Check out the "why so many angry audiophiles" thread.

Anger is a pandemic in of itself these days especially with the internet serving as an easy tool for people to use to stoke and/or release it.

Good music that sounds good can be a wonderful treatment for that.

Music is analog consisting of sound waves.

Amplifiers and speakers also operate in the analog domain using electric signals that vary in intensity over time....not just two values strung together to create other values which is what happens in digital domain.

Sources can be digital and reside on computers but the digital information has to be converted to analog to make music.

To do that the digital electric signal must accurately represent the digital information at the source and then be converted to analog. Time is a key component of music so the D to A process has to get the time dimension of the analog signal created from the digital one right or in other words produce the right information at the right time.


You can see that is a complex and sensitive task and results can vary widely. Music waveforms are analog, complex and hard to represent accurately especially at higher frequencies.

Any program that resides on a digital computer must convert to analog at some point in order for a human to interact with it.

What is displayed on your computer monitor is also a result of Digital to analog conversion but a different kind. Here the digital signal is converted to light intensities and color using pixels on a computer monitor and what you see (which can also vary) is the result of that digital to analog conversion process. 

Same thing happens with a HDTV. 

So the bits on the computer in digital domain are always carefully preserved Else the programs would not work But it’s the conversion from digital to analog where results can vary widely.

Hope that helps.