The greater the SINAD the better ?

[LegionOfHell]

in the following picture, the higher the number the better the amp ?

so Schiit Heresy is better than Schiit Asgard 3 ?

 

[bobbooo]

in the following picture, the higher the number the better the amp ?

so Schiit Heresy is better than Schiit Asgard 3 ?

Audibly better? No. Past a certain point SINAD is a meaningless metric for the end user as it will be beyond audible transparency. What's often overlooked is that the distortion of your headphones will be far higher than the vast majority of amps/DACs. So even if you had the $60,000 Sennheiser HE1, the lowest distorting headphones in the world at 0.01% THD (which translates to -80dB), the combined distortion with say an average modern smartphone having THD at -96dB would be (worst case, in phase) -79.9dB i.e. an inaudible 0.1dB additional distortion. The DAC/amp SINAD required for audible transparency with a typical headphone with (much) higher distortion would obviously be even lower.

 

[DeepFried]

I feel like a SINAD of 85db is 'good enough' that you won't hear any difference beyond that point. You definitely shouldn't select an amp just on SINAD. the SINAD is just the minimum "this amp isn't broken" bar than needs to be passed.

Also SINAD gives no guarantees that an amp is going to be able to drive your headphones, its basically totally useless except for weeding out the small number of amps that are just badly designed. Thats my thoughts on it anyway.

 

[abdo123]

There are two components to SINAD, noise and distortion.

Distortion increases as the signal power (or amplitude in dB) is increased, it is mostly benign unless it's higher than 0.1% or -60 dB as 99% of listeners are limited with their speakers with regards to distortion.

Noise (tweeter hiss) however can be very audible very quickly, specially when music is not playing.

music is like painting a canvas and noise is how dirty that canvas is before you even started.

yes Higher SINAD means that the device performs better, but that doesn't mean it will strictly translate to a better sound quality.

 

[Phorize]

I feel like a SINAD of 85db is 'good enough' that you won't hear any difference beyond that point. You definitely shouldn't select an amp just on SINAD. the SINAD is just the minimum "this amp isn't broken" bar than needs to be passed.

Also SINAD gives no guarantees that an amp is going to be able to drive your headphones, its basically totally useless except for weeding out the small number of amps that are just badly designed. Thats my thoughts on it anyway.

I don’t think you will find too many people here who will fundamentally disagree with you. In fact I don’t ever recall seeing anyone say SINAD is all you need to know, and certainly Amir’s test battery covers much more.