Flakboy115
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- Jan 19, 2022
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Hello, I am new to the forum and not a expert on audio but I have read a lot about headphones DACs and amplifiers and one thing that always bothers me is that there is this tendency that people say the DAC does not matter, or at least that the amplifier is more important than the DAC.
Let's look at the following thought experiment: Imagine we have a crappy DAC that is very noisy and an amplifier that is perfect aka 0% distortion and no measurable noise. If we put a 1khz sine wave into the dac, we get let's say -100dB of noise across all frequencies (white noise is defined as not bandlimited after all). If we put a 1khz sine wave into the amp we have a clean spike at 1khz and nothing else.
If we plug the noisy DAC into the perfect amp, theorhetically it should just perfectly copy the sound of the noisy dac and just amplify the amlitude right? This means that all the noise will be proportionally amplified as well since the amplifier should not be able to tell what is noise and what is sound (or does it? *vsauce theme plays*). I know that in general, there are methods of reducing noise but they are all based on some form of low pass filtering which in our case, we obviously can't do because then our amplifier has no treble.
My conclusion would be that the bad SNR of a noisy DAC can't be removed by an amplifier, no matter how good. Of course, in the case of a perfect dac with a noisy amplifier, the amplifier would add noise to the perfect signal (that is rather obvious). So the DAC and the amp should in theory have similar noise performance so that "no performance gets wasted".
Thanks for reading and feel free to point out flaws in my train of thought.
Let's look at the following thought experiment: Imagine we have a crappy DAC that is very noisy and an amplifier that is perfect aka 0% distortion and no measurable noise. If we put a 1khz sine wave into the dac, we get let's say -100dB of noise across all frequencies (white noise is defined as not bandlimited after all). If we put a 1khz sine wave into the amp we have a clean spike at 1khz and nothing else.
If we plug the noisy DAC into the perfect amp, theorhetically it should just perfectly copy the sound of the noisy dac and just amplify the amlitude right? This means that all the noise will be proportionally amplified as well since the amplifier should not be able to tell what is noise and what is sound (or does it? *vsauce theme plays*). I know that in general, there are methods of reducing noise but they are all based on some form of low pass filtering which in our case, we obviously can't do because then our amplifier has no treble.
My conclusion would be that the bad SNR of a noisy DAC can't be removed by an amplifier, no matter how good. Of course, in the case of a perfect dac with a noisy amplifier, the amplifier would add noise to the perfect signal (that is rather obvious). So the DAC and the amp should in theory have similar noise performance so that "no performance gets wasted".
Thanks for reading and feel free to point out flaws in my train of thought.