Or yes, of course you would want a “nicely shielded dac box”. “ Well then this is mostly about properly shielding the physical DAC box, so any possible “waves” polluting the environment near my DAC will not get in, no? Is this why I often read that a desktop device will most often be better than a mobile one?“ The bad news is in facts that DAC chips, and the electronics “around” them inside their box are sensible to frequencies up to a few Giga herz (!), sadly coming from a virtually infinite spectrum of possible origins. The problem is that a few unobvious caveats apply.įirst of all it’s important to understand that while EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference) and RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) investing, say, a laser printer while printing a Word page on paper is not going to significantly (or at all) change the quality of a 600 dpi printed text, DAC chips and the rest of the circuitry around them will greatly change their behaviour, and ultimately reproduce “different sounding music”, when subject to EM/RF (and other) perturbance.Īnd no, it’s not enough to protect (“shield”) the DAC against perturbances in the human audible frequency ranges (20-20.000 Herz give or take) because this is not “only” about preserving the DAC’s job result after it obtained it, rather it’s about making sure the DAC is not “disturbed” while it’s doing its job. Too bad that this is not the point.ĭACs are devices supposed to take such digital data (FLAC or whatever files) and convert their contents “on the fly” (i.e., while still receiving them one little chunk at a time) into analog data (i.e.
A bit is a bit, and the very same bits stored into (say) a FLAC file onto the PC’s hard disk will reach the externally connected USB DAC once sent over. Don’t tell me you ‘hear’ deterioration in the process as there can’t obviously be – data will not deteriorate!”.
“ Cmon… A bit is a bit! The PC just has to transfer a digital file to a digital device, via a digital interface. The first and simplest perplexity an IT enthusiast, or specialist, comes up with when confronted with the above situation is typically a variation of: an hi-tier Laptop) can be quite far from being an ideal platform for an apparently “light” data transfer activity such as streaming digital audio from where its passive containers (the FLAC or WAV files) are, up to a USB-connected DAC. An extended version of an article I originally released a few months ago: an hands-on review of iFi Nano iUSB3.0 USB power supply and signal conditioner.Īs I am going deeper and deeper into my audio passion, one of my most “interesting” discoveries has undoubtedly been that an apparently high end, high efficiency IT system (e.g.