Yes, they and their advertisers count on that.
The amplifier also "magnifies" the signal. So the minuscule distortion is still relatively the same.
By way of example, my $129.00 Topping E 30 DAC has a SINAD of 112. My headphone amp that also functions as a volume controller for the amp, a Topping L30, has an amazing SINAD of 121. I don't know what the SINAD of my Yamaha RX-V461 AVR is, but when I have my ear up against the tweeter of one my speakers I can't hear any hiss at all. I haven't measured the output level of the average volume of playback when I listen to music, nor the ambient noise of the house I live in, but I'm pretty sure the contribution of the refrigerator is at least 25 db and I'd rarely play music back at a volume level greater than 85db. I never hear any background noise if I'm listening via headphones or speakers.I'm going to assume you are posting in good faith, and answer in that vein.
An average ish performing DAC my have Sinad of around 100dB. That means any "tiny changes" (noise and distortion) are 100dB below the level of the music.
What is 100dB? It is 0.00001 - yes correct - that is 100,000 times smaller than the music. Lets visualise that with a visual comparison.
Take a penny. I think the British penny is similar in thickness to a USAnian one, or a Euro cent - slightly less than 2mm. Lets just call it 2mm for simplicity.
Make a stack of them 100,000 pennies tall. That stack is now 200m high. About the height of the One Court Square building in long island city (see image)
Now imagine you are at the base of that building looking up. You want to see the whole thing without moving your head or eyes. You walk away, looking back until you can. Stand and look at the building taking in the hight - no eye moving remember.
Now imagine the stack of pennies the same height. Looking at it from the same distance. Can you see the individual pennies?
Thinking of it more from an audio point of view. The quietest sound a human can hear is 0dB. The nose floor in a fairly quiet room is already 20 to 30dB. A typical listening level for music is about 75 to 80dB. 90dB is pretty loud. If you were listening at 100dB - maybe the level of a loud nightclub, you'd be putting your hearing at risk after about 15 minutes.
But even when listening at 100dB dangerous levels, the noise and distortion is 100dB lower - at 0dB - the quietest sound a human can hear. Can you even hear your room noise floor (30dB) when playing at 75dB? Of course not, so no chance at 100dB - and yet the noise/distortion from this DAC is still 30dB below (31 times smaller) the noise floor of the room. The music is now so loud you can't even hear someone shouting next to you - let alone the sound of a small feather landing on the back of a kitten.
So, no - the "tiny changes" introduced by the DAC are not audible even when amplified - first because even when amplified they are lower than we can hear, but also because the music is also amplified and would mask them even if they were 100 x bigger.
Oh - and this is just an average DAC. The best DACs measured here are more than 10x better than this average one. So the stack of pennies is now 2km (1 1/4 miles) + high. Or 10 of these buildings one on top of the other.
View attachment 333198
No pain, no gain.
Any DAC you could have bought for the last three decades would perform better than you can hear. But not all of them would have the same warranty policy, user-interface, connections, average long-term reliability or visual appearance. Those are the things which consumers should be directed to.
I bought a Modi+ because I needed a USB interface for my PC. It sounds just like the DAC in everything else I use and that is a good thing.
It's exactly this kind of clarifications we need to make understand (at least to me!) that Digital is a done deal and has been for a long time if well implemented, instead of falling for all the snake oil, of yet another "high end" brand that re-invented the wheel with their 30.000 Dollar/Euro/Pound dac's, which blows away everything that came before of course, at least according to them.I'm going to assume you are posting in good faith, and answer in that vein.
An average ish performing DAC my have Sinad of around 100dB. That means any "tiny changes" (noise and distortion) are 100dB below the level of the music.
What is 100dB? It is 0.00001 - yes correct - that is 100,000 times smaller than the music. Lets visualise that with a visual comparison.
Take a penny. I think the British penny is similar in thickness to a USAnian one, or a Euro cent - slightly less than 2mm. Lets just call it 2mm for simplicity.
Make a stack of them 100,000 pennies tall. That stack is now 200m high. About the height of the One Court Square building in long island city (see image)
Now imagine you are at the base of that building looking up. You want to see the whole thing without moving your head or eyes. You walk away, looking back until you can. Stand and look at the building taking in the hight - no eye moving remember.
Now imagine the stack of pennies the same height. Looking at it from the same distance. Can you see the individual pennies?
Thinking of it more from an audio point of view. The quietest sound a human can hear is 0dB. The nose floor in a fairly quiet room is already 20 to 30dB. A typical listening level for music is about 75 to 80dB. 90dB is pretty loud. If you were listening at 100dB - maybe the level of a loud nightclub, you'd be putting your hearing at risk after about 15 minutes.
But even when listening at 100dB dangerous levels, the noise and distortion is 100dB lower - at 0dB - the quietest sound a human can hear. Can you even hear your room noise floor (30dB) when playing at 75dB? Of course not, so no chance at 100dB - and yet the noise/distortion from this DAC is still 30dB below (31 times smaller) the noise floor of the room. The music is now so loud you can't even hear someone shouting next to you - let alone the sound of a small feather landing on the back of a kitten.
So, no - the "tiny changes" introduced by the DAC are not audible even when amplified - first because even when amplified they are lower than we can hear, but also because the music is also amplified and would mask them even if they were 100 x bigger.
Oh - and this is just an average DAC. The best DACs measured here are more than 10x better than this average one. So the stack of pennies is now 2km (1 1/4 miles) + high. Or 10 of these buildings one on top of the other.
View attachment 333198
I'm going to assume you are posting in good faith, and answer in that vein.
An average ish performing DAC my have Sinad of around 100dB. That means any "tiny changes" (noise and distortion) are 100dB below the level of the music.
What is 100dB? It is 0.00001 - yes correct - that is 100,000 times smaller than the music. Lets visualise that with a visual comparison.
Take a penny. I think the British penny is similar in thickness to a USAnian one, or a Euro cent - slightly less than 2mm. Lets just call it 2mm for simplicity.
Make a stack of them 100,000 pennies tall. That stack is now 200m high. About the height of the One Court Square building in long island city (see image)
Now imagine you are at the base of that building looking up. You want to see the whole thing without moving your head or eyes. You walk away, looking back until you can. Stand and look at the building taking in the hight - no eye moving remember.
Now imagine the stack of pennies the same height. Looking at it from the same distance. Can you see the individual pennies?
Thinking of it more from an audio point of view. The quietest sound a human can hear is 0dB. The nose floor in a fairly quiet room is already 20 to 30dB. A typical listening level for music is about 75 to 80dB. 90dB is pretty loud. If you were listening at 100dB - maybe the level of a loud nightclub, you'd be putting your hearing at risk after about 15 minutes.
But even when listening at 100dB dangerous levels, the noise and distortion is 100dB lower - at 0dB - the quietest sound a human can hear. Can you even hear your room noise floor (30dB) when playing at 75dB? Of course not, so no chance at 100dB - and yet the noise/distortion from this DAC is still 30dB below (31 times smaller) the noise floor of the room. The music is now so loud you can't even hear someone shouting next to you - let alone the sound of a small feather landing on the back of a kitten.
So, no - the "tiny changes" introduced by the DAC are not audible even when amplified - first because even when amplified they are lower than we can hear, but also because the music is also amplified and would mask them even if they were 100 x bigger.
Oh - and this is just an average DAC. The best DACs measured here are more than 10x better than this average one. So the stack of pennies is now 2km (1 1/4 miles) + high. Or 10 of these buildings one on top of the other.
View attachment 333198
- that's it.
Essentially this is how I made my decision as well - It took me a while to learn a lot of the basic stuff, but really, you buy a DAC for technical features once you hit a solid level of quality you are comfortable with. What I was using before my new DAC/AMP combo actually had audible driver induced distortion issues, however, which is where picking the right DAC for your technical feature desires come in.Great analogy - good advice. I pick my dacs based on what I admit is desire and extra musical/technical factors. Most of the time is, I know that the DAC is not distinguishable from the $100 Modi, but I WANT IT!
But it goes many ways, back and forth. If I had owned a Schiit Yggy, I wound't have care in the least that it had that famous glitch. Again it was, in you words, a bad (or a bad couple) of pennies in the whole stack, and not even the reachable (audible) part of it!
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Our ears will never be able to discern perfection, they are just too poor as listening devices and are too subjected to biases in the brain.
I can't say EVERYTHING, but everything I'm aware of (if you include "ultra-expensive fashion audio" stuff as "dodgy").
The language to examine is, "Did this person evaluate ears-only or did he peek?"
Loud and extended, clean bass is indeed difficult. Most of the chain in reproduction audio has, however, been a solved problem for many years and now is merely a price war so one can simply choose products that are "good enough" based on specs and usability, just like engineers choose test equipment. Speakers can only be judged in-room, IMO, since the interaction between speaker and room overwhelms everything else in the chain outside of the original recording. I do understand the itch some have for over-specified devices, however. One thing I always recommend is people get a hearing test and take some of the online tests for distortion and jitter to see where their limits are first before deciding what is relevant to their hearing.
Where can I find some good tests for this online?
That is not necessarily true for very nearfield monitors that are designed with a narrow dispersion pattern. At one meter, such monitors have direct sound levels that are substantially directly from the monitors themselves. The room plays a much smaller role. For farfield and midfield speakers the issue is quite different than for very nearfield, narrow dispersion monitors..
Depending on speaker design and placement you may still have reflections from a rear wall but I agree that generally, near-field is a less complicated case.
Correct, it also depends on room size/dimensions.
