If you’ve ever listened to an MP3, watched a movie on Netflix, or jumped on a Zoom call, you’ve used a DAC. Digital-to-analog converters (or DACs for short) are the unsung heroes of the digital audio age. They’re everywhere: in smartphones, TVs, soundbars, wireless earbuds and headphones, and without them, these devices would be utterly silent.
But what exactly is a DAC, how does it work, and why would you ever want to buy a dedicated DAC, when it seems like they’re already in all of our favorite devices?
The bad news: this is a technical topic that can get ultra-nerdy at times. The good news: we’ll go through it step by step, making sure we explain all of the core concepts as we go. Ready? Here’s everything you need to know about DACs.
What is a DAC?
As the name implies, digital-to-analog converters are dedicated microchip-based translators that take the zeros and ones of digital audio and turn them into the electrical impulses that all speakers or headphones need to give you audible sound.
Though they’re highly sophisticated, DACs are simply the latest version of audio technologies that have been with us for more than a hundred years.
Vinyl records store sound waves as tiny grooves on the vinyl. When a turntable‘s needle (stylus) runs through these grooves, it vibrates, creating a tiny electrical signal that can be heard as sound once it passes through an amplifier and speakers.
When audio cassette tapes are played, they move across the surface of a playback head that can read the different magnetic charges on the tape’s surface and once again convert them into speaker-friendly signals that simply need to be amplified.
While it might be an oversimplification, a DAC can be thought of as the digital audio equivalent of a turntable’s stylus.
So a DAC is a microchip? Why would I buy a chip?
Yes, the actual task of converting zeros and ones to analog signals is performed by a chip. And no, unless you’re an audio product designer or engineer, you wouldn’t buy a DAC chip on its own. Like an internal combustion engine without the rest of the car, it wouldn’t be very useful.
When we talk about buying a DAC, we’re referring to dedicated equipment designed to give you better audio quality than you’d get with all of those products that already have their own built-in DACs (the smartphones, TVs, wireless headphones, we referred to at the start).
These dedicated devices come in a wide range of shapes, sizes, and prices (we’ll discuss many of them in a moment), but since they’re all built around a DAC chip as their core technology, we often refer to the whole device as a DAC.
Who needs a DAC?
Truthfully, few people need a DAC. For most of us, the DAC that’s already built into the devices we use every day will be more than enough to let us hear good quality audio.
If you have a laptop, the internal DAC is fine for the audio coming out of the laptop’s speakers. And if it has a headphone jack, the internal DAC will let you listen with your wired headphones — depending on the laptop and your audio source it can sound really good. Same thing goes for TVs, CD players connected to stereos, or your favorite Bluetooth speaker.
This is also very important: even the best DAC won’t make a poor set of headphones or earbuds sound significantly better. To appreciate the difference a dedicated DAC makes, you’ll need high-quality cans and/or speakers.
Thus, DACs are for folks who want something better than fine, or who have specific format compatibility needs. We often refer to these people as audiophiles, but that label carries with it visions of people pouring thousands of dollars into hugely complex audio setups. It’s more accurate to say that DACs are for people who want their audio experience — at whatever level of investment they’re willing to make — to be as good as possible.
Here are just a few example scenarios where it could make sense to buy a DAC:
- You have access to source of hi-res digital audio, e.g. the Qobuz streaming service, but your laptop or phone’s built-in DAC isn’t able to process that audio at its native sample rate, e.g. 192kHz. Instead, the audio is resampled to a lower rate, which can have an adverse effect on sound quality.
- You have access to digital audio in special formats like MQA or DSD, that can’t be natively decoded by a regular DAC. We’ll discuss audio formats more in a moment.
- You’ve recently upgraded your amplifier/speakers/headphones, and you suspect the DAC built into your older receiver or other gear is now the weakest link in your audio quality chain.
- You have an iPhone and you simply want to hear lossless audio at its full quality.
Scratching your head over that last one? Every iPhone since the iPhone 7 has infamously lacked a headphone jack, leaving iPhone users with two choices: buy a set of wireless earbuds or headphones, or buy a Lightning (or USB-C) to 3.5mm adapter for wired listening.
Bluetooth earbuds and headphones, when used with an iPhone, always receive “lossy” audio due to the iPhone’s limited support for Bluetooth codecs. So the only way to hear unadulterated lossless audio is with wired headphones via an adapter. Inside every adapter — from the cheapest $9 dongle to those that cost hundreds — is a DAC.
Wait, does that mean DACs are always wired?
Yes. If you want your DAC to perform at its best, it needs at least a wired output so you can connect it directly to headphones or to your hi-fi gear, whatever that might be. Once a DAC has done its job, you’re working with an analog audio signal. If you try to send that signal to another device wirelessly, it must first be converted back to digital, which defeats the whole point of buying a dedicated DAC in the first place. Once you’re analog, you want to stay analog.
A DAC’s input is more flexible. Some DACs have their own built-in music streaming capability — like the Wiim Ultra. In this case, the DAC can receive its digital audio over Wi-Fi, or even Bluetooth.
But a more typical DAC scenario uses a wired input as well as a wired output. That input could be an optical connection from a CD player, an HDMI connection from a Blu-ray player or TV, or a USB connection from a phone, laptop, desktop PC, or tablet. What these wired inputs all have in common is they’re digital. If you happen to come across a DAC with analog inputs, that means the device also has an ADC (analog to digital converter), but we’ll leave that topic for a different article.
What do I need to know about DACs and audio formats?
Digital audio comes in lots of flavors. MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC, ALAC … and many more. It’s tempting to think that your DAC needs to understand them all, but the truth is actually far simpler.
Most DACs can only process one type of format: LPCM.
LPCM stands for Linear Pulse-Code Modulation, and it’s the basis for almost all digital audio. It’s the uncompressed format found on audio CDs. It doesn’t matter whether the music you’re trying to play is a lossy MP3, a stream from Spotify, a CD you ripped to FLAC, or lossless ALAC from Apple Music — it all gets converted to LPCM before it ever touches a DAC.
So while your DAC doesn’t need to understand those other formats, your chosen music app does need to understand them so that it can convert them to LPCM. Good ol’ iTunes, for instance, doesn’t understand FLAC. If you tried to play a FLAC file in iTunes, it wouldn’t work. Not because your DAC doesn’t understand FLAC (no DACs understand FLAC), but because iTunes can’t convert FLAC to LPCM.
However, there are two other digital audio formats that must be processed directly by a DAC if you want to hear them in their fullest quality: DSD and MQA.
DSD is the hi-res audio format used by Super Audio CDs and many digital music fans consider it to be the best format. You can find software that will convert DSD to LPCM, but that’s a deal-breaker for DSD aficionados. To play these files natively a DAC needs to be DSD-compatible.
MQA is similar to DSD in that it’s possible to play the MQA format using software alone. But MQA has several layers known as folds, and only the first fold can be handled by software and converted into LPCM. If you want to fully unfold an MQA stream, you need a DAC that can do it.
For several years, MQA-compatible DACs were in demand because Tidal used MQA as its exclusive format for its highest-quality streams. However, Tidal has since switched over to FLAC for its entire lossless music catalog, and no other streaming service has added MQA support.
Lenbrook has said it will launch a new streaming service with HDtracks that will offer MQA, but for now, there’s little reason to look for an MQA-compatible DAC.
Bits and samples
OK, so if you don’t intend on playing DSD or MQA files, won’t any DAC do the trick?
Once again, it comes down to how serious you are about getting the best possible audio quality.
LPCM has two main characteristics: bit-depth and sample rate. If you’ve ever seen an article refer to CD quality as “16-bit/44.1kHz” it’s because that’s the bit-depth (16-bit) and the sample rate (44.1kHz) that’s used for the LPCM audio on standard CDs.
If you want to learn more about bit-depth and sample rate, we have a handy guide to hi-res audio that should answer your questions. For our purposes right now, all you need to know is that LPCM can exist at higher (and lower) bit-depths and sample rates, all the way up to 32-bit/768kHz.
This is where garden-variety DACs usually fail a key requirement: They can’t match the bit-depths and sample rates of some hi-res audio. In this case, you’ll either hear nothing (the stream simply won’t play) or you’ll get analog audio that has been resampled. Resampling, if you’re a purist, is to be avoided.
Some built-in DACs can handle up to 24/48, others may go as high as 24/96. And while 24/96 is considered an excellent level of resolution, there are plenty of hi-res tracks and albums that exist as 24/192 — Apple Music, Tidal, Qobuz, and Amazon Music all maintain 24/192 collections. To play these tracks without any loss of fidelity, you want to look for a DAC that can process them natively.
DSD is a little different. It’s always the same bit-depth (1-bit), but its sample rate can vary from 64 times as fast as CD quality (DSD64) up to a whopping 1024 times as fast (DSD1024). DSD1024 is very rare — typical DSD files are DSD64, DSD128, and DSD256. But the same rule applies: to avoid resampling your DSD tracks, your DAC should natively support the DSD sample rates you want to play.
Beyond formats
Getting a DAC that supports your desired formats, bit depths, and sample rates is important, but it’s also just the starting point in terms of actual audio quality.
How DACs are designed and built can have a big impact on what you hear, which is why there’s such a huge range of DAC brands, models, styles, (and prices).
Noise, distortion, and jitter — these are just some of the unwanted side effects of the digital-to-analog conversion process that can be mitigated (to a greater or lesser extent) by the engineering choices made by a DAC’s designers. If your DAC is primarily designed to drive in-ear monitors (IEMs) or headphones, that introduces further considerations like amplification power, impedance matching, and the availability of balanced outputs.
Any one of these areas could fill entire articles. Whether you need to care about them depends entirely on your listening gear and your belief in your ability to hear the difference from one DAC to another.
Choosing a DAC
Since DACs come in all shapes, sizes, and prices, picking the right DAC is all about combining your budget with the way you listen (or want to listen) to music.
Starting small with a DAC/amp dongle
By far the easiest and most affordable way to get in the world of DACs is via DAC/amp dongle. We call these little devices dongles because they’re strictly designed to be used as add-ons to computers or smartphones/tablets. You wouldn’t use one with a hi-fi system, for instance, but they’re perfect for converting your phone into a hi-res powerhouse. They’re priced anywhere from $10 to $450, which should give you an idea of the huge range of capabilities and quality you can expect.
We also refer to them as DAC/amps because they not only convert digital audio to analog but they also amplify that output signal so you can hear it via wired earbuds or headphones. Most have just a single 3.5mm headphone jack, but increasingly, we’re seeing models that sport a second 4.4mm balanced output for IEMs/headphones that support this kind of cable.
There are two main styles of DAC/amps: those that come with multiple input cables and/or adapters, and those that just have one kind of input (usually USB-C or Lightning, but occasionally USB-A too). Multiple input DAC/amps tend to be a bit more expensive due to the flexible nature of their design, but the tradeoff is that they work with almost every device and platform.
You’ll also find that within each style, there may be a variety of indicator LEDs. Some have a single LED that just confirms power and correct operation, some have a single LED that glows in different colors to show the various formats and/or sample rates it’s currently playing, and some have multiple LEDs for more detailed information.
Keep in mind, these LEDs are there to give you a visual indication of what the DAC/amp is doing, but they aren’t required. You could have a highly capable DAC/amp that only has a single LED for power, or perhaps no LED at all. Internally, it’s still doing what it needs to do.
Also worth remembering is that even though you can buy a $9 Apple Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter (which is technically a DAC/amp), it’s a very limited device. It’s maximum bit-depth/sample rate is 24/48, and it does not handle MQA or DSD. The same is true for many of the USB-C-to-3.5mm adapters you’ll find on Amazon. Always read the specifications and ideally, read professional reviews too.
Examples of DAC/amp dongles:
Portable DAC/amps
These are a step up from dongles in size, price, and often performance. These DACs usually have a built-in rechargeable battery because they require more power than a smartphone or laptop can provide.
You can expect to find more inputs and outputs (some double very effectively as desktop DACs — see below) and they sometimes have advanced features like selectable filters.
Examples of portable DAC/amps:
Desktop headphone DAC/amps
DAC/amp dongles are perfect for on-the-go, but if you’re going to do most of your listening at home a desktop DAC/amp might offer you a greater choice of options for both inputs and outputs. You don’t need to spend a fortune here either — decent desktop units start at around $50, but also go as high as $5,500 for those who want the ultimate.
These devices typically require their own power supply (dongles take their power from the attached playback device) and they’re larger, with a footprint sizes that range from a deck of cards to that of a small computer like an Apple Mac mini.
You’ll usually find multiple wired digital inputs (USB-A/USB-C for computer audio, and optical/coaxial for other sources like CD players) and some models add wireless digital inputs like Wi-Fi, AirPlay, and Bluetooth to the mix. But the biggest reason people opt for a desktop DAC/amp is power. The internal amplifiers on these devices can be much bigger and more powerful than dongles, which lets them drive a greater variety of IEMs and headphones, especially high-impedance models, which need more power.
Look for products that have a variety of headphone outputs, in addition to at least one line-level output (usually a set of left/right RCA jacks) so you can send the converted analog signal to a hi-fi component or powered speakers.
Examples of desktop DAC/amps:
- Fiio K11 R2R DAC
- Ifi Zen DAC V3
Dedicated hi-fi DACs or DAC/amp
If your ambition is to up your hi-fi game, nothing beats a dedicated hi-fi DAC or DAC/amp. They’re designed to fit with component systems that may have a variety of existing devices like CD players, A/V receivers, integrated amps, and dedicated amps. Some of these products are strictly DACs — there’s no headphone output and no amp of any kind. But in some cases, these devices are essentially the same as desktop DACs, just styled and shaped to be a better fit with component systems. Prices can vary wildly, from $100 to thousands.
Like desktop units, you can expect to find a variety of stereo digital inputs (both wired and wireless), but some also come with HDMI ARC/eARC for use with a TV’s multichannel output. Depending on the model, it might have a simple set of RCA analog output jacks, or it might also include balanced XLR outputs for use with very-high-end downstream components.
If you plan to use one of these DACs with streaming music services and you don’t own a dedicated network music streamer, consider looking for a model that supports DLNA, AirPlay, and Google Cast over Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
Examples of hi-fi DACs
- Cambridge Audio DACMagic 200M
- Eversolo DAC-Z8
