Drop The Bass, It’s All About The DAC

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Already

There has been much ado about the DAC found on your motherboard, stereo or headphone amp, but not much discussion about why one Digital to Analogue Converter is better than another, or even how that could be.  Hackaday have been doing a series on the various components which make up modern audio devices, and recently they discussed what a DAC is and how do it do what it does.

They provide a brief overview of how a DAC works, the close relationship between sampling frequency and signal frequency is, why that old portable CD player you had sported a sticker claiming it had Bitstream, Oversampling or a 1-bit DAC and a variety of other details you may have glossed over but are now curious about.

This is also one of the rare times it is strongly recommended you read the comments at the bottom as well.