Will a dac make a difference?

Equipment / Electronics / Gear / Accessories DACs
1

So i received my Schitt Heresy today!! Amplifier has definitely made the bass fuller and highs more sharp!
Listening through my PC via RMA to 3.5mm (z390 aorus) at full volume and amplifier set to hi gain about 50% volume. I can’t hear any distortion. So my question in the absence of distortion should I be looking to purchase a Topping D10 or similar? Will this improve sound even further?

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2

So you are already most likely getting a clean enough signal to not have any issues with the motherboard, but you can get better sound quality by getting a better dac, with more detail, a bit better spatial recreation, and overall a higher quality experience. It’s not going to be night and day, but it will be a noticeable improvement overtime imo. Also personally I would say if you can try and go for the topping e30 if you wanted to add a tad of warmth into the system but still be relatively neutral

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3

Limited with what i have access to in AUS! Would a ifi zen be worth buying to use just as a DAC?

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4

The zen dac is a pretty solid choice, warmer and smoother leaning dac from my experience, whereas the d10 is more analytical in comparison, both will serve you well, just depends on the type of sound you are after

5

I have never used the amp in my ifi zen. its a great dac.

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6

Imo it’s more of a dac first than an amp, the amp is mainly for balanced iems imo, doesn’t have the same strength as a more dedicated amp

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7

Sounds good. Ill Buy it then!

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8

You will love it :slightly_smiling_face:

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9

DAC lives matter. Seriously though, people spend a ton of money on turn tables… a DAC is practically the same thing but does more work to make the sound.

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Would it be really bad to say that the IFI zen on its own sounds better than ifi zen / heresy combo!!

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For which headphones? It might be a better match depending on the headphone

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12

Zen sounds brilliant with the hd58x. Zen just doesnt quite drive the 990dt which osund much better on the heresy with zen as DAC!

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I could see that, the 58x isn’t that power hungry and the zen is a bit smoother more colored amp so that is most likely a good pairing. I’m not surprised that the 990 doesn’t sound ideal as that’s a harder to drive headphone

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14

Qn, Do i need to change anything in windows in regards to bit output?

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Not really, I would just install the ifi drivers and then set it to 24 bit 192 khz (assuming you don’t get dropouts), and make sure to disable any windows sound enhancements if any are enabled

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Okay only has 32 bit options so that will have to do!

17

So you would have to install the ifi driver, here is a link (it might auto start a download)

https://ifi-audio.com/firmware/iFi%20(by%20AMR)%20HD%20USB%20Audio%20Driver%203.20.exe