I'm considering buying a dac and I wanted to pole people on how significant a difference people think a dac can make.
In a blind test, do you think an external USB dac would sound noticeably better then the headphone jack on my laptop? To be specific, if I were to close my eyes and listen to both the line out from my MacBook Air and also a ~$200 good dac, with high quality source audio and connected to a high quality amp and speakers, would I be able to identify the dac as sounding significantly better?
Apparently the soundcard in MacBook airs and other apple laptops are actually pretty good. They support 24 bit audio and up to 192 kHz.
Do people think the differences are very subtle, and are more a matter of preference / tossup, or do people think there's a clear difference, and '9 out of 10 audiophiles' would pick up on those differences in a blind test?
I'm considering buying a dac and I wanted to pole people on how significant a difference people think a dac can make.
In a blind test, do you think an external USB dac would sound noticeably better then the headphone jack on my laptop? To be specific, if I were to close my eyes and listen to both the line out from my MacBook Air and also a ~$200 good dac, with high quality source audio and connected to a high quality amp and speakers, would I be able to identify the dac as sounding significantly better?
Apparently the soundcard in MacBook airs and other apple laptops are actually pretty good. They support 24 bit audio and up to 192 kHz.
Do people think the differences are very subtle, and are more a matter of preference / tossup, or do people think there's a clear difference, and '9 out of 10 audiophiles' would pick up on those differences in a blind test?