Hello! I was wondering if someone could help me in finding a dac or source of some sort to act as a pre-out for my power speakers. I have a spare set of Swan M200’s and I’m getting a 4k TV in my bedroom. I don’t know if I need anything or plugging the swans straight into the tv would be fine, any suggestions would be great. Budget is $100-$400
If the tv has optical out which I am sure it does then you should not need anything as far as I know. You will have to set it the tv sound to pcm I believe.
What version of Swans you have?
If they optical input you don’t need anything else.
My tv does have optical, I do have optical on the swans I have now, would that do good?
Hello,
The Dac alone is not enough.
You need either an Av or stereo amplifier.
The Tv is your source that feeds the Dac via optical or coaxial connection. From the Dac you go via RCA out to the stereo or Av amplifier.
You logically connect your Swan to the amplifier.
In principle, it has to loop through what arrives from the TV to the boxes.
If you have a coax connection on the TV instead of optical, you can of course, the Dac only has to support it.
I think of the Cambridge Audio Dac magic 100 which is quite solid than Dac. Of course you can also go a little cheaper with the topping D10. You can also go in with both via USB if you want to play music on your PC or laptop.
And yes, theoretically, if your TV has an optical connection, you can connect it directly to the Swans, that would be possible.
Otherwise you need a Dac that has an optical out.
Or an Av or stereo amplifier with which you can go in via coax and output as an optical out.
The Fostex Hp A 3 has an optical connection with in and out.
But no coax as source only usb and optical.
Look behind the TV what you have in terms of connections and outputs and what can be adjusted in the menu.
You sure…? M200 are powered speakers.
Look into a Topping E30
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The Swans have optical input and TV has optical output… he does not need anything else.
Swans also have remote so it controls the sound. Optical gives full audio volume and Swans control the volume, they indeed have a DAC. 
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Yes, plug and play.
So you don’t need a dac also.
I would throw out a recommendation for the Topping D50S. It’s quite nice with remote and bluetooth. Really small too so it doesn’t ruin the space much or at all.
But then again, you can also just go optical from TV to the Swan M200’s. So you don’t really need the separate DAC unless you have more sources than your TV that you want to connect.
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It might actually be detrimental to use an external DAC if the speakers are doing any digital processing internally, because you’d be doing double D/A conversion.
Edit - Looks like it does have a DSP based crossover, so you’d want to use the DAC in the speakers otherwise you are going source -> DAC -> ADC -> DAC -> AMP
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