Quality of DACs built-in to Laptops

spaace

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Hi,

I recently bought a humble step up earphones (Sennhieser c300S) but was met with a lot of siblance and harshness, until i connected to them to a different laptop

I was using a company provided macbook pro, so i assumed the DAC would be great and suspected the earphones.

Connecting them to a an ASUS ROG, made the harshness go away. When i tried to find the DAC in the Asus i found some news articles that claimed it had an ESS Sabre, though i do not know which version it included. I couldnt find the DAC details of the macbook

Ia'm not sure what is causing the difference, if its really the DAC or something else - any help / sources would be appreciated to help maximize the quality of the music i seem to get from my earphones.

Anyone else pursuing the quality of earphone connected to laptops ?

Thanks
Arun
 
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ASUS ROG - Do you mean Phone or motherboard (PC)?
Macbook Pro - Can you share which model?
 
ASUS ROG - Do you mean Phone or motherboard (PC)?
Macbook Pro - Can you share which model?
where can we find the chipset from MacBook Pro? Any website showing details of DACs in MBS ? To mine (2010!) sounded nothing special. I think but o the new ones the Type c dongle would just work in case someone finds the sound to be bad. The dongle for iPad sounds same as iPhones dongle and it’s a very decent dac.
 
where can we find the chipset from MacBook Pro? Any website showing details of DACs in MBS ? To mine (2010!) sounded nothing special.
At least in 2010, external DACs were helpful in getting pure audio. Over the period of time, nowadays most of the laptops have good DAC competing cheap external DACs. The reason I asked for Macbook model is that I remember a reddit thread on downgrade of DAC in recent MBP. With this background, it is expected that ASUS ROG which is a gaming/multimedia beast gives better sound. In nutshell, MBP does not mean great, some times there is regression in specification, since it is a black box, not revealed loud. Apple don't reveal spec for a reason sometimes :)
 
At least in 2010, external DACs were helpful in getting pure audio. Over the period of time, nowadays most of the laptops have good DAC competing cheap external DACs. The reason I asked for Macbook model is that I remember a reddit thread on downgrade of DAC in recent MBP. With this background, it is expected that ASUS ROG which is a gaming/multimedia beast gives better sound. In nutshell, MBP does not mean great, some times there is regression in specification, since it is a black box, not revealed loud. Apple don't reveal spec for a reason sometimes :)
The older ones like I have, have an optical out, but the rest of the machine is totally outdated. That comes handy for dacs with toslink input. But not an essential feature newer ones must have, as USB noise is suppressed well on many dacs.
 
iPhones and Macbooks by nature sound bright. Some people who look for detail, prefer that sound.
I used an iPhone 6S as the source connected to my integrated amp directly, it was harsh enough to cause fatigue, and the macbook air (2015) that I have now is no different. But when I introduced an external DAC, things calmed down a bit.
But things further improved when I used a Raspberry based transport connected to the same external DAC. That's when I realized Macbooks sound bright even if used as just transports.
 
But not an essential feature newer ones must have, as USB noise is suppressed well on many dacs.

Often I see "USB noise" in this forum. Having some experience in working on R&D of USB/SATA/NVMe chipsets, I still can't understand that. USB is a digital transport. So 0s and 1s are sent along with multilevel checksum. So a packet of data (here audio) is either accepted or rejected at other end. When ever it is rejected it is sent again in no time. This is process is not commonly found in even cheap cables. Theoretically in very very worst case, when we use the the worst USB cable or highly noisy environment, this reject/resend process may lead to a micro-second or a milli-second delay. But it is applicable to Coax/Optic too. It is not easy to find such a worst cable in the market :) In lab we use to spend error injector equipment worth of lakhs/crore to create noise on these digital signal cable. So there is no such "USB noise" in any standard setup in my understanding. It is similar to Coax or optical.
 
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I have a macbook pro 2017 and it drives Beyerdynamics dt770 80ohm... I get very detailed sound at around 80% volume.

Then, I bought fiio e10k dac/amp and to my surprise macbook was better than fiio; fiio just increased the volume but in terms of sound it added some harshness and grain.

So I send those back and got dragonfly red (thanks to this forum :) ) and yes drangonfly is surely improvement over MBP's internal soundcard, it has very open sound and no harshness at all.

Hence I made an assumption that it would take atleast midtier DAC to see a notable improvement over MacBook's sound card.
 
Often I see "USB noise" in this forum. Having some experience in working on R&D of USB/SATA/NVMe chipsets, I still can't understand that. USB is a digital transport. So 0s and 1s are sent along with multilevel checksum. So a packet of data (here audio) is either accepted or rejected at other end. When ever it is rejected it is sent again in no time. This is process is not commonly found in even cheap cables. Theoretically in very very worst case, when we use the the worst USB cable or highly noisy environment, this reject/resend process may lead to a micro-second or a milli-second delay. But it is applicable to Coax/Optic too. It is not easy to find such a worst cable in the market :) In lab we use to spend error injector equipment worth of lakhs/crore to create noise on these digital signal cable. So there is no such "USB noise" in any standard setup in my understanding. It is similar to Coax or optical.

The noise it not digital, 0s and 1s are voltages. So suppose 0 is 0volt and 1 is +5v.
The noise is the deviation in those voltages caused by the magnetic fields (current flow causes that) of other components.
That's why high end components are put in shield over the chipset.
Similarly jitterbugs are used to reduce USB noise by isolating them.
It's very subtle but it's there for sure.
 
Often I see "USB noise" in this forum. Having some experience in working on R&D of USB/SATA/NVMe chipsets, I still can't understand that. USB is a digital transport. So 0s and 1s are sent along with multilevel checksum. So a packet of data (here audio) is either accepted or rejected at other end. When ever it is rejected it is sent again in no time. This is process is not commonly found in even cheap cables. Theoretically in very very worst case, when we use the the worst USB cable or highly noisy environment, this reject/resend process may lead to a micro-second or a milli-second delay. But it is applicable to Coax/Optic too. It is not easy to find such a worst cable in the market :) In lab we use to spend error injector equipment worth of lakhs/crore to create noise on these digital signal cable. So there is no such "USB noise" in any standard setup in my understanding. It is similar to Coax or optical.
It’s not technically usb noise. This is not related to the data stream I am speaking. For usb powered dacs the power line is taken from the pc itself which is run from smps of the pc. In some cases, this would contribute noise to the analog stage of the dacs. Only in some cases. So depends on what devices you tried you may have seen it or not. Check the audioscience reviews measurements, you have some dacs which has some issues with usb but not with coaxial. But again not all device combinations results in noise.
 
In my PC which I was using as an HTPC till a few months ago, I added a USB3.0 PCIEX card. Before adding this card, I had my USB cable connected via an AQ Jitterbug. Jitterbug did make a slight difference. Noticeable in A - B comparison. However, adding the PCIEX card made an instant difference. Not sure what it did, how it did, but it took that edginess away from the music. Adding the Jitterbug to the addon card made no difference.

So if you use a PC, add a USB 3.0 pciex card like this one: Transcend PCI Express Interface USB 3.0 Expansion Card

MaSh
 
It’s not technically usb noise. This is not related to the data stream I am speaking. For usb powered dacs the power line is taken from the pc itself which is run from smps of the pc. In some cases, this would contribute noise to the analog stage of the dacs. Only in some cases. So depends on what devices you tried you may have seen it or not. Check the audioscience reviews measurements, you have some dacs which has some issues with usb but not with coaxial. But again not all device combinations results in noise.
Got it, it makes sense.
 
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