My DAC is bigger than your dac! A "mature and serious" debate

[MazeFrame]

@Mush

I would love to know more about this hobby and DAC’s confuse the shit out of me

Technology Connections made a fantastic video explaining the mathematics behind DACs:

Nyquist-Shannon; The Backbone of Digital Sound

@bruh.wav

I think measurements are great. They are important in providing an objective point of view, but for me, it doesn’t do much use.

Signal to Noise greater 90dB is more than good enough (Vinyl is 50-ish dB, typical CDs are in the 90s dB range).
I don’t think I ever saw measurements of DACs that are actually useful (outside of Spec Sheets from the DAC chip manufacturers that have loads of graphs instead of single numbers…)

Some things you could measure (by no means complete):

@MazeFrame

• Clock Rate, as in how many cycles the DAC setup/chip does in one second
• Clock Jitter, clock timing variation
• Sample Rate, Sampels taken per second/time division
• Over Sampling Rate (can be 0), comparisons taken between output and input signal
• VRMS, how “hot” the output signal is
• S/N R, Signal to Noise Ratio
• S/N-D R, Signal to Noise and Distortion Ratio
• Monotonicity, The “directness” of the analog signal reaching the desired level
• THD, Total Harmonic Distortion
• Dynamic Range, Total Voltage swing of the output

@Raptor168

I think a big problem/misconception in this area is the notion that you have to spend a ton of money to get a truly good sounding DAC.

There is a minimum BOM cost to reach a given quality. It is not just the DAC chip, but the supporting components for power supply, filters, etc. The cost can only go so low before cutting corners.
Same for size. A properly designed circuit board can also only get so small (or large) before compromising isolation, signal integrity, etc.

@Flaculence

So bio organisms cannot cope with the forces science can reproduce, for now. We know this via measurement.

You would be surprised what tiny differences humans can detect reliably.

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Everything the signal touches or passes through matters. The extent to which it is important to you, is up to you.
Feature Count ≠ Quality