On this page, I want to list all written articles with extra sources to give you the best chance of understanding what is going on with head-fi.
The source
The source is not a very useful term, but what I mean by this is the digital audio file. We won’t go into the full recording process but it is important to know a few things.
The player
So now we are at the point at which we have a compressed file for you or streaming services to use, so what to use? It’s simple, we want lossless. So anything that can give us a true lossless experience is the same.
Tidal has an interesting but important note!
DAC
Almost everything has a DAC, your phone, your computer, and more. If it can produce a sound it will need a DAC to turn those bits into the wiggly air we all love. An exception is “old” ways of audio, like vinyl or wax. Here is analog signal is directly placed into the object so it will never become digital.
So if your phone or desktop already has a DAC, then why do you need a new one? Good question! It’s all about quality. A phone maker has no reason to spend big money on a high-quality DAC, so why would they? A dedicated DAC, made to sound as good as possible can have big improvements in quality.
A pure DAC will also make your life a little bit more complicated since in theory, all the DAC will do is transform that digital file into an analog frequency. It does not give an actual input for your headphone, the analog signal will first need to be passed through an amplifier.
Sometimes the DAC will have the capability to be a source. The most common is USB to a streamer or PC, But a DAC might also carry support for Bluetooth, or TIdal/Spotify connect. But most of the time it will need another device to talk to this. For all the way to connect to a DAC see the following article:
So now we are connected to the DAC with the streamer, PC, or DDC (See more info about this at the bottom.). What is the difference between DACs?
AMP
An amplifier that uses the analog output of the DAC to push the sound to your headphones further.
Headphones
Finally, the part that you can hear. But first, we need to talk about some terms you might hear often: