Looking for budget DAC suggestions please

googler

Sandtree said:

dcouponzzzz said:

Hi there,

Please let me prefix this by saying that I'm not an audiophile, nor do I have any of the knowledge of one! I do however appreciate good quality sound  

I was looking at a pair of Sennheiser HD600 and a DAC (at least that's what I think I need). Could anyone suggest a sub-£200 DAC to connect between the headphones and my PC? If you need any specific specs of the PC please let me know. It's an Aorus Gaming 5 Z370 mobo and I don't have a dedicated sound card. 

Thanks in advance, and apologies for not knowing what I'm talking about

The spec for the mobo says it has audio jacks and an onboard sound processor so an external DAC is unnecessary unless you arent happy with the sound quality. 

Would add my vote to the Dragonfly too. 

The whole point is to get better quality by A - not using the headphone out on the PC, and B - offloading the digital processing off the mobo.

dcouponzzzz

Thanks everyone! I'd honestly never heard of these tiny portable DACs I've done some preliminary research and I think I'll be looking at what deals I can get on black friday for either the Dragonfly Red, or the THX Onyx. Leaning more toward the Onyx for durability/longevity based on a significant amount of build quality issues with the Dragonflys. Also considering a Jitterbug to add to the line as the Cobalt is out of budget. 

Thanks again

Sandtree

dcouponzzzz said:

Thanks for all the info everyone, if a DAC isn't required then would an amp improve the quality? Shut me down again if it's completely unnecessary, I just don't want to spend £300+ on headphones and be bottlenecked at some point down the cable!

You will struggle to find a decent headphone amp for your budget.

The Dragonfly is a DAC/Headphone amp in one and the vast majority of headphone amps these days have a DAC built into them and a reasonable proportion of them are portable in size and nature... just because of where/how headphones are most commonly used.

A few years ago there were more pure headphone amps, like Arcam rHead at £400, but these have mainly fallen out of favour and the ones that remain are much higher pricepoint. 

I would be surprised if the onboard DAC on the Mobo was better than that in a Dragonfly so it represents an easy solution but theres always a risk it is (easy to test though in your cooling off period if bought new online). You have to pay a substantially more to get a notably better DAC/Headphone amp combo (eg Chord Mojo)

cx6

Just for the record, you can also plug the Dragonfly into your Android smartphone usb-c socket (using a short lead)

Heedtheadvice

I too would expect almost any one of the dragonfly interfaces to meet your monitoring need. Pick one that fits your budget + interface cable if required. If you can pick up a Cobalt second hand that would be a good buy.

There are other interfaces that are cheap (and only so so quality) and much more expensive that you might go for especially if you are an audiophile or looking for studio quality but well out of your budget.

Just be aware that if you ever wished to do equally good recordings rather than just playback then you might consider an interface with input (microphone/instrument channels) as well as monitoring as you could buy for a similar price under your budget and have both record replay facilities. The earlier mentioned Berhinger interfaces are a common budget option there but there are others.

The HD600 are very good phones and will reproduce very well everything that they get as an input. You would usually have to pay a lot more to get better (with maybe a few competitors in the same price range) so a good choice. That being the case if there are any pertubations, gremlins etc being reproduced by your gaming pc on it's analogue output (and that seem more likely with gaming pcs - fizzes and crackles) then you will be more likely to hear them with the better phones. An off board external dac interface, dedicated for audio quality, usually improves that. It is an existing issue the better the listening device the more problems coming frm the source you might hear.

Similarly the open back design headphones such as the 600 are more prone to letting you hear room noise and produce you listened to sound in the room. Best for 'transparency' in reproduction but downsides too.

jamesd

One easy way to get a matching DAC is to buy bluetooth headphones. Those send a digital signal to the headphones which use their own built in DAC and that can be expected to match the rest of the headphone capability. Can lag a bit vs video on a screen.

An inexpensive DAC that I have is this one. It does the first job of getting the digital to audio conversion out of the electrically noisy environment inside a computer and provides a good deal more power than my computer. Maybe not enough for your headphones but worth a try to see whether you can notice any difference.

Worth noting that the open back headphones will be noisy for anyone in the same room as you. A private listening experience isn't something that open-back designs deliver and you'd probably annoy those close to you on public transport.