Imagine a scenario: you’ve become the owner of high-quality over-ear or in-ear headphones, plugged them into your phone, and… The sound is like under a blanket — no volume, no detail, everything is muffled. You turn up the volume, but the effect is no greater than trying to inflate a punctured tire. Yet in the store, it “played and sounded.” What’s the matter?
To unlock the headphones’ potential, the salesperson connected them to a portable player capable of driving even the most demanding models with high impedance and low sensitivity.
Today, we want to look under the hood of portable devices and figure out whether a user needs an external DAC with an amplifier, or if the one built into the phone is sufficient. Although headphone jacks are becoming less common in new smartphones, we predict that soon not only Apple devices, but the entire market will abandon them. So, let’s turn to DACs.
What is a DAC?
A Digital-to-Analog Converter, as the name suggests, converts a digital signal consisting of zeros and ones into an analog electrical impulse that we hear through headphones and speakers. DAC chips are installed everywhere: in laptops, smartphones, and TWS earbuds. Any sound from vinyl, streaming, or the phone’s internal memory is converted into a sound wave during playback. The DAC’s job is to recreate this continuous sound wave from the multitude of points (bits) of digital sound.
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Stop! What’s Wrong with the DAC in My Smartphone?
You need to understand that music playback is not the primary task for a phone, and the DAC installed in them is often mediocre, especially in budget devices. The accuracy of the sound you hear through your headphones depends on this tiny chip on the circuit board. We are currently witnessing a pursuit of studio accuracy for home listening, and in this race, the DAC is the engine of the racing car. It can either handle the revs or spin out of control and ruin the entire machine.
“Audiophile smartphones” are rare — you can count them on one hand — meaning you need to use an external solution. Let’s move from analogies to specific features of using an external DAC/amplifier.
What Problems Does an External DAC/Amplifier Solve?
- Impedance. A headphone characteristic that indicates their resistance to the sound source. Resistance is measured in ohms, and the range is wide: on average from 8 to 600 ohms. High-impedance headphones (over 100 ohms) require a powerful signal, which a phone cannot generate. The entire battery charge would be depleted just for listening to music (which is unacceptable). Moreover, what you hear would likely be disappointing: quiet sound with poor frequency separation. This problem is also relevant for laptops and PCs. Note that an external device combines two units in one chassis — an amplifier and a DAC. It is the amplifier that helps handle high impedance.
- Background noise. Have you noticed the quiet moments in a track? You can often hear hissing in them, which smears the overall perception of the sound. Part of the dynamic range containing useful sonic information can get lost in this hissing. An external converter with a built-in amplifier can clean the signal from this digital and analog noise. It is much “quieter” than a smartphone when it comes to interference.
- Jitter. Briefly, this is a problem arising from timing errors in digital signal transmission: bits are either rushing or lagging. An analogy is a clock, which always has some margin of error; the second hand sometimes misses a beat. In mechanical watches, this error can be minutes. In digital audio, the signal can also arrive late. The problem of jitter is not as acute as it was ten years ago, but it can negatively affect sound, especially at high frequencies where the wavelength is short and the transmission speed is high. High notes affected by jitter may sound out of tune, inaccurate.
- Inability to play Hi-Res. The built-in DACs in smartphones or laptops cannot convert high-resolution music — for example, bit-perfect playback in DSD (Direct Stream Digital) format. They are limited to PCM (the most common type of digital audio transmission). Of course, PCM isn’t terrible; many formats exist with minimal sound loss: FLAC, ALAC, CDDA. However, in most cases, people listen to compressed formats through their smartphones — an unacceptable option for us.
Which External DAC/Amplifiers Are Convenient to Carry?
- For a laptop. External devices for high-quality music playback now vary greatly in shape and size. Today, we’re not talking about desktop units, but models that fit easily in a pocket alongside a smartphone. The best solution for portability is compact USB DACs. Some look like ordinary USB flash drives, for example, the Audioquest DragonFly Red. Such a “flash drive” connects to the laptop, and audio is processed through it, not the computer’s internal circuitry. A convenient solution for those who always have their laptop handy while traveling.
- For a smartphone. To work with a smartphone, new DAC models are equipped with USB-C, simplifying connectivity. Stand out from the crowd — carry an external headphone amplifier instead of a power bank. A portable DAC/amplifier is generally lighter and more compact than an external battery. The device is powered by your phone’s charger, but newer models are not “power hungry.”
As a top-tier USB-C DAC/amplifier, we present the Violectric Chronos. This is a sub-brand of the legendary manufacturer of professional studio equipment, Lake People. It’s rare to find a device with European origins on the market: the Violectric Chronos is made in Germany.
This is an example of a DAC/amplifier that will remain relevant for a long time: its arsenal includes DSD playback up to DSD256, as well as an impressive dynamic range of 130 dB. What does this number tell us? Dynamic range directly affects the quality of musical detail resolution. This is especially important if you prefer complex music: orchestras or jazz.
A large dynamic range allows you to clearly hear even the quietest sounds in a track and isolate individual instruments from the overall picture. The Violectric Chronos is capable of this, with practically no self-noise. It has enough power to drive even the most demanding headphones: the amplifier delivers 5 mW at 600 ohms.