Just how bad do dacs have to be before we can actually here them?

[Purité Audio]

ASRers I just want to tap into your combined knowledge:-
Just how bad do dacs have to be before we can actually discern a difference.
There is poor engineering which I believe everyone here abhors but actual audibility?
This is for one of my interminable blog articles so I will quite understand if no0ne replies.
Keith

 

[nerdemoji]

my guess is 60-80 sinad, especially if its noise dominated

 

[DVDdoug]

Personally, I've never heard a difference or defect from a "DAC" except I once had a soundcard that made noise when the hard drive was accessed. And I've never owned a stand-alone DAC.

 

[Svet Angelov]

Are we theoretically ABing against a top-performer dac/one that has ~90db sinad?

Or just playing music outright and trying to hear a difference?

 

[Purité Audio]

I realise distortion is a can of worms, different types, the ears variable response to frequency.
What can one hear -60dB with music programme?
Keith

 

[Purité Audio]

Are we theoretically ABing against a top-performer dac/one that has ~90db sinad?

Or just playing music outright and trying to hear a difference?

Both really, how bad and what specific form of bad would we be most likely to hear?
Keith

 

[Mikig]

I have come across faulty DACs, with hum, strange masses, or asymmetric channels! you can clearly feel these!
They happened to me, in fact I still have quite old DACs. I loved them, but I have to admit that when I changed and landed on 2023 products I noticed differences.
We are talking about two devices with more than 20 years of difference.
The older one has no apparent defects, in fact, I lived with them until the day before yesterday. But the “youngest” is something else. Audible. I'm not talking about timbre, but about silence, dynamics, bass. Actually the second two parameters could be related to a different output level. But the silence, or rather the background noise, is quite distinguishable. Furthermore, the first stops at 44Khz and 16 Bit, while the second reaches everywhere.
It would probably be interesting to be able to try the older DAC from new!! 20 and more years I fear they are starting to have effects on electronics too.
However, I confirm that I found two brand new generation DACs practically indistinguishable and with almost identical performance, even if they have a different layout.

 

[Svet Angelov]

Both really, how bad and what specific form of bad would we be most likely to hear?
Keith

If noise dominated and without having something to immediately switch to and compare with, then I'd guess we will have to go reallly low (40-45 dB depending on playback level?) for most people to say "hey something's not right" . Distortion is another beast and one I definitely don't have any knowledge of, all I know is I think I can easily distinguish a purposely distorted track when ABing against the original file

 

[Chr1]

I have certainly had one where the analogue side wasn't particularly good and introduced both audible noise and distortion. I will bet that some of the "audiophile" ones with large toroids will do this too. Reckon most differences between DACs will be of this nature, not the DAC part itself.

 

[MaxwellsEq]

In the early days of CD and standalone DACs, I could discern differences. These days I can't, but that might just be age related hearing degradation. Subjectively the first external DAC I bought improved instrument separation and timbre, but I didn't perform a level adjusted blind ABX! I associate masking with noise and intermod, so I don't think the improvements came from lower harmonic distortion, but because noise was better handled.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I wish I had a copy. There used to be a nicely recorded orchestral piece. Mixed in was a raucous marching band at -60 db from the average level of the main piece. You couldn't hear it.

Most DACs even pretty poor ones if they are heard are going to be from FR errors. Weird filters or just poor designs. Otherwise unless malfunctioning or truly broken designs they aren't easy to hear. Why would any DAC have noise above -80 db unless it is messed up? Our ears are much more forgiving with music than most realize.

 

[Mnyb]

Our favorite tread .

Audibility thresholds of amp and DAC measurements

Introduction A recurring theme on ASR is whether or not the various measured qualities of the devices are audible. In this post, I'll present some clear and visual thresholds for when those imperfections can be considered a potentially audible concern. I will not explain the basics of amp/DAC...

www.audiosciencereview.com

 

[Blumlein 88]

Mixed signals.zip

Shared with Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

Try this one. Will unzip into a FLAC file. Short snippet of music with some quiet parts. Some -56 db below the average level is a rock song. You might hear it especially with headphones. I think you'll be surprised that it isn't worse.

 

[DSJR]

I still have a 2012 era little black box 'dac for a fiver' which I've used powered from a 5V wall wart (DC socket used for power). On the very ends of reverb tails and hiss reproduction in general I heard (or imagined, take your pick ) a very slight 'dirtying' of the sound, but at normal levels it was absolutely fine.

FM radio in the UK is around -70dB noise I believe (13 bit) and with a clean signal coming in, I don't notice that at all these days unless I whack the volume up.

 

[SIY]

There used to be a nicely recorded orchestral piece. Mixed in was a raucous marching band at -60 db from the average level of the main piece. You couldn't hear it.

Audio DiffMaker example files

Where I've had audibility in DACs is from poor anti-imaging filters causing frequency response errors. You have to search high and low to find such, but at least one of the filter settings on my RME ADI-2 Pro was repeatably audible when double-blind tested.

 

[olieb]

I found this interesting.
Sine tones ("distortion")were added while music was playing. The threshold when the listeners noticed the sine tone depended on frequency and relative level. The distortion levels could be quite high before becoming detected.
LF seems to be masked to a very high degree (and not only harmonic distortion).

https://www.axiomaudio.com/blog/distortion/

 

[Purité Audio]

Thank you for posting @Mnyb I will check that out.
I suppose my question should have been where are we most likely to hear poor engineering.
Looking through some of Amir’s and JA’s measurements, poor engineering is evident in,
Power Supply noise
Jitter
Harmonic/IMD
broken/non existent filtering
Poorly implemented inputs
probably many more, Amir in his review of the Total Dac ( one of the poorest measured) that despite all its faults he was only able to discern a very slight difference in a filter.
Thanks everyone.
‘Keith

 

[Mikig]

I would be curious to understand the use of a higher "Clock". I've read a lot about it, clearly the theory is flawless, but I'd like to be able to see if there is any evidence upon listening...

 

[benanders]

Can this potentially be more album-dependent than DAC-dependent?
Way back in the waybackwhen, my father figure claimed 100% of what came out of my Panasonic CD player boombox was “noise.”

Right. Back to serious matters.