Intro

Hi guys, this is Raghav here from Headphone Zone. In today's video, I'm going to try and explain to you in very simple layman's non-technical language what a DAC does and why you should get one.

Why do I need a DAC? 

The music we listen to in today's day and age in all its forms, be it on MP3 or on a streaming platform, is all stored in digital formats in zeros and ones. The zeros and ones carry the information about what the music file contains, the sounds and the instruments, everything. Now this was recorded in a studio by the artist and exported in a digital format for the convenience that digital files allow us in transferring information all around the world very conveniently over the internet. The only thing is that our ears and our headphones don't understand digital formats, they understand an analog format in the form of a waveform that the headphone plays into our ear canal, reaching our eardrum and finally giving the brain the information it needs to understand the music you're listening to. So at some point of time between the file and the headphone, this digital information needs to change to an analog format, and that's where a DAC or a Digital to Analog Converter comes into place.

Now all smartphones and laptops of today's generation, every one of them comes along with an inbuilt DAC, something that you can plug a 3.5 mm jack to and listen to music very conveniently. The only problem is that the DAC built into the smartphone and the laptop is almost always without exception of a very very low quality, that does not sound very nice especially if you're listening to music on high quality headphones. The DAC that is built into the smartphone or your laptop does a perfectly fine job when you're streaming music in low quality and listening to it on a cheap pair of earbuds, but the minute you start listening to music at high quality and higher resolutions and with a nice serious pair of headphones, you'll find that you need to get yourself something better that does a better job of reproducing the original waveform that the artist created from the zeros and ones which are stored in the file, be it streamed on Spotify or YouTube or Apple Music or on an MP3 file that you may be listening to.

Good DACs take a certain amount of assumptions and calculations which ultimately take that digital information and produce a much more lifelike sound wave that it's transmitting from the 3.5 mm output. A good DAC can make the music sound more detailed, more lifelike and bring out a lot of nuance in the music that you may not have otherwise heard. This only matters if you've got a nice headphone, and believe me, if you're watching this video, you probably already have one. Getting yourself a dedicated digital to analog converter is just the easiest thing in the world for you to do to improve the sound quality, and believe me, once you've heard what a DAC is capable of, you're not going to go back to listening to music without one.