Not necessarily. In fact, we are in a golden age of well-engineered and less expensive devices, from DACs to amplifiers to headphones and IEMs. Good speakers tend to be a bit pricier simply due to the masses needed to damp out vibration modes, larger magnets, and so on, but there are fantastic speakers at relatively low prices as well. Sites…
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When Compact Discs were invented they encoded analog music using 16 bits of resolution at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz. A rate of 44.1 kHz gives the Nyquist frequency of 22.05 kHz (half the sample rate) and supports unaliased reproduction of frequencies from 0 to the Nyquist frequency. 22.05 kHz covers the hearable frequency range of human beings. As…
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A streamer is a device that gets digital audio streams from an online or local source and passes them on to a DAC. There are many devices that combine the streamer with a built-in DAC and then output just the analog signal for input to an amplifier or pre-amplifier. We will call these streamer-DACs. If they also have a power…
