So I’ve currently got my SHP9500’s plugged into the audio output of my keyboard because its the most convenient, but does anyone know if that would lower the audio quality compared to hooking it up directly to the front IO on my case or the output on my motherboard?
So ideally you would be getting the best signal from the headphone out on the rear io of your motherboard, as they tend to have a better audio quality because of less length to send the signal across and also most modern boards have beefed up headphone outs and dacs on the motherboard itself (but they still don’t compete with a proper headphone amp and dac) but don’t beef up the front panel connectors so typically the front panel has worse quality
What motherboard are you using?
I’ve got a lowerend/midrangeish gigabyte b350 with a realtek chipset
What keyboard?
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Gotcha, well assuming your board doesn’t have beefed up audio, it would still be better to run it directly from the motherboard for less interference and noise potential. The shp9500 isn’t that amp picky anyways tbh.
My bad, I completely missed this, this would be helpful information as well
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If you add a dac to a motherboard does it matter the audio quality on the motherboard?
Like a separate external dac? So it can actually but it depends. If you use usb, if your motherboard has noise or interference or a poor quality usb power it could affect noise but that’s not exactly the same thing. A case where onboard audio could affect a dac would be if you use the optical toslink out on your motherboard to your dac, if they don’t have a good quality toslink signal it could degrade quality of the dac connected to it. But for the most part using an external dac will bypass your motherboard dac
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Ok so just to be safe you should get a decent motherboard audio out but don’t go crazy?
I mean just get a decent quality motherboard and you are set
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