Mac's DAC's n listening results.

[EdwardLionheart]

HI Forum
I've recently bought a MacBook Air M1 and for sh*ts m giggles (having no previous streaming experience) plugged it straight into my veery musical vintage tube amp playing Premium Spotify through the headphones out. Well the result was quite incredible to me, hairs on end stuff which got me wondering about going further, so Im asking if anyone having used this laptop or the M2 or maybe any Mac with an outboard DAC into their Hifi (not headphones) and what results were obtained? Whether it's truly worthwhile going to a lossless system with a good measuring DAC from Amires top teir or going Streamer+ Dac to amp.
What y'all think?
Wishing you great health and happiness

P.s my interest in music is Music, all genres all styles no prejudice.
Pps. This is NOT about DAC or Streamer or any gear recommendations. Im only interested in whether or not you've heard a substantial difference between the headphone out to an amp and the USB to DAC to amp and hopefully what the differences are.

 

[staticV3]

That you will get greater sound quality with an external DAC is questionable.

That you will get stutter on the other hand is likely:

Audio stutters with USB Dacs on Macbook M1 Pro

I need help getting external DACs to work correctly on my 2019 Macbook Pro M1. I experience audio stutters as soon as I have a high system load. The stutters occur once every few minutes, each lasting only very short. The audio quality itself is excellent, and the DAC itself work fine. The...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Edit: therefore, instead of buying an external DAC, I'd recommend you spend that money on SoundSource (or similar) for Headphone EQ, or SoundSource plus a UMIK-1 for Room Correction.
If you want to increase the sound quality of your system, this is the way.

 

[Axo1989]

That you will get greater sound quality with an external DAC is questionable.

That you will get stutter on the other hand is likely:

Audio stutters with USB Dacs on Macbook M1 Pro

I need help getting external DACs to work correctly on my 2019 Macbook Pro M1. I experience audio stutters as soon as I have a high system load. The stutters occur once every few minutes, each lasting only very short. The audio quality itself is excellent, and the DAC itself work fine. The...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Best to finish reading the thread. If you were getting stutters as I was, do the normal OS upgrade as I did and leave that issue behind. More adventurous people discovered via the beta a few months prior, but the Sonoma release was 26 September.

 

[staticV3]

Best to finish reading the thread. If you were getting stutters as I was, do the normal OS upgrade as I did and leave that issue behind.

Looks like the problem is still not fully resolved:

Sonoma didn't fix the audio stack crashes for me. I have Mac Studio M1 Max 64Gb. I'm using Apple Music lossless + Ifi Zen v2. Maybe Tidal has sw that bypasses Apple buffering problems.. need to check.

Hey guys, just wanted to report since I've also had this issue since getting my m1 machine about a year ago and it's been driving me crazy. I have a 16 inch M1 pro Macbook with 16gb ram. My interface is a Babyface Pro which I've had for years and never had issues on my Windows machine. I'm running Sonoma and the problem is still there the same as always.

 

[Axo1989]

Looks like the problem is still not fully resolved:

The posts from @Vezza indicate they resolved their issue using the Mac Studio's USB-A port, not something I can compare. They mentioned issues with higher bitrates but I haven't found that (lower bitrates didn't help me before, higher doesn't hurt now). The post from @Supernormal specifies stutters but doesn't indicate audio source or any other details: it's their first and only post here so we'll see how that goes. Everyone else posting post-update reports success iirc.

 

[EdwardLionheart]

That you will get greater sound quality with an external DAC is questionable.

That you will get stutter on the other hand is likely:

Audio stutters with USB Dacs on Macbook M1 Pro

I need help getting external DACs to work correctly on my 2019 Macbook Pro M1. I experience audio stutters as soon as I have a high system load. The stutters occur once every few minutes, each lasting only very short. The audio quality itself is excellent, and the DAC itself work fine. The...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Edit: therefore, instead of buying an external DAC, I'd recommend you spend that money on SoundSource (or similar) for Headphone EQ, or SoundSource plus a UMIK-1 for Room Correction.
If you want to increase the sound quality of your system, this is the way.

Ok I will check it out thanks. Stutter seems to be an issue with lossless no? This was on apple forum https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254683171

 

[staticV3]

Stutter seems to be an issue with lossless no?

High sample rates in the Audio MIDI Setup seem to increase the likelyhood of stutter if I remember the ASR thread correctly.
Lossless on the other hand doesn't make much of a difference afaik.

 

[holdingpants01]

update helped in my case, both Tidal hi-fi and Apple Music lossless plus immersive with 12 speakers work fine regardless of what I simultaneously do on a computer. I had problems with audio drops from DAW while browsing the web, especially with pages like facebook and incoming messages there. I thought that soundsource with impulse response was causing it but on Sonoma it's fine

 

[wavetrade]

Perhaps I have been lucky but I love using macs to deliver my music. I have one M1 mini and two M2 mini's going into E50, D6 and SU1 dacs. As I haven't had any problems I am not totally up to date on the issues people are having. But I suspect my good luck comes from using USB A outputs for all of my audio cables. And using good quality cables.

My sources are Tidal, Qobuz and Apple Music. I tend to leave my Midi settings at 24/192 and am using exclusive mode with Tidal. Only wish that Apple and Qobuz had a similar option for their music players on Mac's. But they still seem to sound excellent, just slightly less gain, despite running through the mixer.

 

[Vezza]

The stuttering might depend on what you happen to have at same USB3 bus. My console logs were stating that upstream hub was killing the USB2 connection ( my stuttering came back, but it was 14.0 stability problem ). This made me check how the mac USB2/3 buses and USB2/3 devices are connected - and to my surprise I found 5 USB3 buses, most empty, but one had several USB3 devices and a hub for Studio USB2 connections. So the connectors don't necessarily have their own USB buses, the setup is more complicated. My IFI DAC is clocking the data, and if there are any shared USB buses it might make constant bit flow difficult to have, though the bitrate of music is far from any USB bus capabilities.