You might have heard the term DAC or D2A converter before and had no clue what someone was talking about, whether it's in print or somebody speaking to you or describing, you know, the features of a product. So, I talk a little bit today about what a DAC is, what it does very, very general and simple because it can become a very complex topic.
And then I'm going to tell you where you may want to look at getting a DAC. So, let's start with DAC. What is a DAC? It stands for digital to analog converter. Sometimes it's called a D2A, you might see that instead of DAC or a D with the digit 2 and an A.
All of them are the same thing, digital to analog converter, and pretty much the name tells you exactly what it does. A DAC converts a digital signal into an analog signal that we can then amplify and pass on to a loudspeaker. Any signals that are in the digital domain are manipulated in the digital domain.
They can be stored on things like a CD, a DVD, a Blue-ray, a computer file, etc. But those digital files are useless to us without converting them back to analog because a series of ones and zeros, essentially, is not something that, you know, we can listen to and actually determine that it's music.
So, we have to convert that digital signal back to an analog signal so that it can be listened to over a pair of loudspeakers or a set of headphones. And that's all a DAC is. And DACs are ubiquitous in everyday life now. DACs don't necessarily have to be dedicated to audio.
There's many digital signals that we have to bring into the analog domain to actually process them and use the data. But when we're talking audio and video, pretty much any digital component these days has got either a DAC, a stereo DAC, or multiple DACs built into that piece of electronics.
If you have a CD player or a DVD player or Blue-ray player, your cell phone, your tablet, all of these things have a DAC built into them. A home theater receiver has multiple DACs because all of the multiple, you know, sometimes up to 11 channels, plus subwoofers of audio information, all that has to be converted back to analog.
So, simply, that's all a DAC is. Now, people ask, "Well, do I need a DAC?" or, "What's important?" or, "Do I have to worry about a DAC?" Well, the answer is no in most cases, because, like I said, they're built into most pieces of audio and video electronics that we tend to use every day.
If you're concerned about the ultimate audio performance, one place that we see DACs very commonly is when used with computer audio. And I'll give you an example. Let's say that you have a huge library of digital music files, and they can be in any format, WAV, MP3, FLAC, any of those formats and there's probably 100 more.
And you want to actually play them from your computer to either a set of headphones or on audio system or a pair of dedicated computer loudspeakers. Well, most of you are aware that, you know, a computer, a desktop computer usually has a sound card in it. And pretty much every laptop on the market has a built-in sound card, even though it technically doesn't look like a card from the outside.
And that's where you'll see, you know, your jacks for microphone inputs and headphone outputs. Now, what a lot of people will do is they'll just connect a pair of powered computer speakers or connect the cable to, you know, a receiver or amplifier from the headphone out or the Line Out jack if you have one on your laptop or desktop computer, that's perfectly fine.
However, the built-in DAC that is going to be in a computer, particularly, in laptops, it's not really in most cases going to be state of the art. Yes, if you've got a desktop computer, you can buy absolutely fantastic sound cards that will give you state-of-the-art performance.
But if you're using a laptop, what comes out of that Line Out or that headphone output jack is not going to necessarily be the best quality possible. There's another issue. And that's that electronics' sensitive analog electronics is sitting inside the noisy contaminated world of a computer in a small case.
So, you've got sensitive analog circuitry sitting next to high-frequency clock signals and all kinds of things that can cause interference and noise. And another major issue that people run into is ground loops, that they get hum when they use the headphone out and connect it to a you know, conventional receiver or amplifier, or a pair of computer speakers, and that's often because the way the computer handles grounding from an audio standpoint is many times not ideal.
In those cases where you either got a problem trying to get the audio out of your laptop or desktop computer, or you just want the best quality possible, that's what many people mean when they're talking about or asking, "Do I need a DAC? Do I need an external DAC for my system?" And in those cases, you can certainly get one and there's many, many of them on the market.
And usually, the way that we will connect an outboard DAC that's designed to be used with a computer is with a USB cable. We're all familiar with the USB connection. Now, many times you'll find that these external DACs are a little box and they may even have a built-in headphone amplifier.
As headphones have grown in popularity over the last few years, many, many people are having a dedicated, very, very high-end system, sometimes thousands and thousands of dollars going towards a headphone amplifier DAC combo and then a pair of headphones. So, this is one place where you'll see a lot of little headphone amplifiers that have a built-in USB DAC into them.
You'll also see a number of computer loudspeakers. I've got a Axiom M3 computer speaker here, and it has a USB input that goes directly into a built-in DAC in our computer speakers. So, there's a number of options of ways that you can improve your computer sound quality by adding an external DAC, either in a small box or built into a pair of dedicated computer speakers.
And if you tend to have most of your music on a computer or particularly, if you want a good office system, this is the perfect way that you can keep working and then select the track to play without having to go to another device or another piece of equipment. So, if you want the best, look at getting an external DAC for your computer audio system.
Otherwise, just understand that DACs are a part of our everyday lives and while the name sounds weird, remember, all it does is give us an analog signal out of a digital source.
