Digital Audio – Part 8, USB DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) DAC is the essential part of digital audio without it all digital data just nothing but bunch of numbers. Another essential part of digital audio is ADC (Analog to Digital Converter, wiki for detail) it convert sound to digital data enable it to transmitted, manipulated, and stored without degradation of quality. There are few parts to determine the performance of DAC basically resolution & maximum sampling rate can support are easy to identify, as mention in Part 3, sound quality CD has 44.1Khz and 16bits resolutions. In early days all DACs are only support PCM so when playing DSD data it will convert to PCM first before send to DAC, currently high end devices can handle PCM & DSD natively in “bitperfect” (pure original data conversion) without conversion to get pure sound quality as recorded. As I mention before to own a USB DAC can be affordable or very expensive it depend on how deep your pocket, but somehow I found a portable USB DAC with full of features like support sampling rate up to 768Khz/24bits & DSD512 (even 90% of 5 figures DAC can only support up to 384Khz/24bits & DSD256) with an affordable price tag, sound quality is exceptional. I really cant describe how good it sound you have to hear it yourself. to be continue ...
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 13:22:48 +0000