Exactly how do AMP/DACs work, and why are they so sought after?
In: Technology
A DAC, or Digital-to-Analog converter takes a digital music file and outputs an analog signal.
The opposite of that is an ADC, or Analog-to-Digital converter. Lets start there. . .
Using the simplest example, imagine ringing a tuning fork. Under perfect circumstances, that tuning fork produces exactly one note. That pure, single note, is travelling through air from the fork to your ears as a pressure wave, vibrating at a specific frequency, in the form of a sine wave.
When a computer records music, rather than recording the pressure wave continuously (like a lie detector or earth-quake recording machine), it is “digitized.” In one second, the ADC will take 100,000+ equally spaced time points, recording both the frequency and its intensity. So instead of a smooth drawing of a wave, it becomes 100,000+ points, that when looked at from far enough away, is “smooth enough.”
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The DAC takes that “smooth enough” data file and reverses the process, producing an electronic wave that is then sent to a speaker which then recreates the pressure wave, so your ears can hear it.
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When recording audio, there are two key ingredients — Bit Depth and Sample Rate.
Sample rate is how many time points are taken per second. If you do not sample quickly enough, the sound can be distorted due to a process known as aliasing… which I can’t think of a way to describe without graphs.
Bit Depth is how many different levels of “loudness” there are. Imagine, a bit depth of 1 would basically mean “on or off.” A 16bit depth means there are 2^16 different levels of “loudness.”
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A new/better DAC is sought after when you have a digital file with a higher sample rate and/or bit depth than your current DAC allows. Also, the new/better DAC may produce less “noise,” thus reproducing the file mroe accurately.
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