If you have a mac, you dont need a dac drop formerly massdrop. If you want to use the mac port as a toslink connection, you will need to buy a miniplug extender for your toslink cable or buy a new toslink to miniplug cable. Plug the usb cable correctly, or you can try to connect the external drive using another usb cable. If you have a mac, you dont need a dac drop formerly. Currently it sounds good to me and the volume is at a pretty perfect level but you guys understand this all far better than. Ive realized that the internal dac on my macbook pro is actually quite good. Since macs have both thunderboltfirewire and usb 2 connectors, it makes sense to use both. Is the internal mac mini dac fine for mqa, or is there a benefit to using a different, external, usb or optically connected dac. Whether or not the dac in an avr will be better or worse than an external dac depends on the avr and the external dac. The old tower power mac s had a burr and brown dac, those were quite good, nowadays the imac have a crap onboard sound output. Jun 09, 2017 maybe this has been covered before but i couldnt find anything.
Macbook air with retina display macbook pro with retina display imac late 2012 and later. I listen to my itunes library stored on a 1tb nas using akg k phones plugged into the dac1 headphone jack. Hirez dacs and macbook pro audio output macrumors forums. Apple has stepped back again from the prosumer level. Mar 12, 2020 sound blasterx g6 hires db 32bit384khz gaming dac, external usb sound card with xamp headphone amp, dolby digital, 7. On one end youll find a microusb input and on the other end is a 3. How to connect mac mini to dac dac digital to analog. Take your audio to the next level with one of these external. There are only the standard pair of leftright rca jacks for output. The amp improves output volume, but did nothing to the sound quality. I am trying to expand into using hires files 24bit192khz from my macbook pro into a usbsdif dac.
Nov 14, 2019 check apples disk utility to see if an external drive is showing up. For now, i can recommend the apple usbc headphone adapter. How to connect a usb dac to a macbook pronwith only usbc. Fyi i have two other dongles to test in the future. Is there already an audiophile solution for a usbc to usb adapteror do i simply use whatever adapterd. Do you need an external digital to analog converter. Isnt my macbook pro already converting digital to analog signal. The mac s analog audio inout ports doubles as a optical inout ports. Mac pro late 20 macbook, macbook air with retina display, and macbook pro models with. The gadget is also capable of producing highquality audio via a builtin dac. In order to play ultra hd, the external dac at a minimum must be capable of processing files with a bit depth of 24bit and sample rates of at least 44. I take the optical digital output from the macbook and run it into my benchmark dac1. Apr 27, 2011 how is the macbook pros sound output quality.
What is the best way to connect a macbook pro to my hifi system. Another reason for your mac not recognizing external drives is a dirty or loose connection between your cable, usbc multiadapter, thunderbolt 3, or other connecting ports. If you have a disk already mounted and your system goes to sleep, it also powers down ports, including usb ports. Audioquest dragonfly black usb dacamp official thread. My living room mac mini uses the dac from my yamaha cd3000 cd player trough usb, sounds excellent use it for plex and itunes. A digital to analog converter, or dac, takes your digital content and transforms it into analog so that your system can amplify it and play it through your speakers. On my imac i use an external musical fidelity v90 dac, and thats really ok.
Both the tidal client and roon can do the first decoding stage of mqa in software. If your device has a builtin dac that does not support hdultra hd audio, then you need an external dac when connecting your player to your headphones or speakers to listen in hdultra hd. Apr 26, 2016 the onboard dac is quite good, as per my observations. Not the most elegant solution, but if you want to hear the full original resolution of your hires files through your iphone, using a dac. The process starts with ripping or downloading music files directly to either your macs internal hard drive or an external drive, or designating a cloud site for your file storage more on this.
Ive got an ifi nano dac amp, a 2017 15 macbook pro and a pair of hd58x. Apple products usually come with a decent built in dac function. But i want something that i can use with my other devices. What is the best way to connect a macbook apple community. Others use a dac on the firewire and external drives on the usb connection. Does a retina macbook pro need an external amp dac. Now that the 2018 ipad pro is making the switch to usbc you might be wondering why apple did it and what, if any, difference it will make when it comes to how your music. Its even better and louder than the sound cards on macbook pros. The microrendu was designed to vanish in the dark recesses of your dusty equipment rack and connect via usb cable to an external dac. When i connect the sound card in the left usb port it doesnt work fine, when i connect it in the right usb port, it seems to work just fine, it only let me the choice to conect tha dac 3 in the left. In a blind test, do you think an external usb dac would sound noticeably better then the headphone jack on my laptop. Optical out to external dac beresford caiman seg to amp this gives a great resolution and is in fact right up there with the same tracks played on cd on a meridian player or cdp as transport to dac 3.
Has anyone done any comparisons listening to their headphone output compared to an external dac via usb. Dec 27, 2010 my old macbook pro 2008 had pretty terrible line out. Dec 09, 2012 recent apple computers have great dacs. Neil young slams macbook pros fisherprice audio quality. So, do you think i can get significant improvement in switching to the external dac route instead of using the macbooks builtin dac.
How much real world difference in sound, if that noticeable, might even be. To take advantage of an external dac, youll want content that is at least cd quality. Does not require an external dac, but one can improve sound quality. Its easy to plug your shure se846 earphones or fostex th900 headphones into your ipad, iphone or apple laptop to connect earphones and inearmonitors. In this video ill go over my new audio setup which includes a macbook pro 2016, chord mojo and lcd2s hopefully this will be helpful to you guys and possibly. Jun 06, 2017 play high sample rate digital audio on mac computers the audio hardware in some macbook pro, mac pro, and imac computers supports 176. If you think you already have dacs in your system, you would be correct. Apr 30, 2015 the headphone out provides pretty good audio to my headphones, but im pretty sure the sound quality could be slightly improved with an external dac. As with most components, the better dacs will cost more. I too am trying to use my mac dac instead of buying external. Does the card have an audible difference compared to plugging speakers directly to macbook. This makes things a tad complicated, but the solution here is to connect an external dac, such as the cyrus soundkey or chord mojo.
An external dac helps with these headphones as it can work as a headphone amp to provide the extra power needed to drive a highimpedance pair of phones. My headphones are akg k550s and i usually listen to flacs. Using the ipad i could compare the amp only feature using the headphone output with the dac amp operation using the lightning connector. I have an external dac in my main system and use a innuos roon core, but when i travel i can even hear a huge difference using my macbook pro and a bluetooth speaker. So, im wondering if id even notice a difference with an external dac. The builtin digitaltoanalog converter dac in your computer converts those bits of data into an electrical signal that is, in turn, fed to the amplifier that makes the drivers in your.
Apple usb superdrive with attached usb typea connector cable. Engaging the dac by connecting through the lightning port provided a very noticeable improvement in sound quality. The dragonfly red dac is a 32bit ess 9016 dac having minimum phase filter and it plays mp3 audio files as well as 24bit 196khz high resolution files without any hitch. With apple dongle i got music but level was very low. Note that the purpose of using external dac has two advantage. Trouble is, my bel canto dac 3 only accepts a maximum 1648 on its usb connection, though 24192 on spdif, aesbsu and optical. Some computer audio systems use external hard drives on the firewire connection and a dac on the usb 2. I really like good sound and can hear the differences between equipment, sound file formats, etc. As for listening to music from your computer through your speakers, adding an external dac, especially one capable of decoding highresolution audio, will often result in noticeably better sound than the dac built into most active speakers. Id be hardpressed to tell the difference between the onboard audio of my 09 imac and hrt music streamerii odac.
Dont worry, apply my task, im sure that you will get rid of on this issue. You can solve your connectivity issue and provide excellent listening quality with the addition of a dac connected to usb output. Dac to really upgrade sound from imac soundcard steve. Other key features of the device include a volume knob, as well as the ability to control the bass and treble via a dedicated switch.
Others use a dac on the firewire and external drives. I tried using my ultimate ears ue 6000 on them and they were awesome on 2015 macbook. Dac for the macbook pro retina, 15inch, early 20 audio. Compare that to a external dac that was only built to handle 2 channel audio from a computer. Do you need an external digital to analog converter for. Currently, there are a number of lossless file size compression codecs including flac, wma lossless windows, and apple lossless mac that will somewhat shrink your music files while keeping all the content intact. The best digital music streamers for your home gear patrol. Cannot adjust volume on a mac os x with external devices. If the issue is with your computer or a laptop you should try using reimage plus which can scan the repositories and replace corrupt and missing files. Want to set up your mac computer to be a hires audio source. My setup macbook pro dac digital to analog conversion.
In a blind test, do you think an external usb dac would sound noticeably. Turning a mac into a music server the absolute sound. I have bought a mac mini to act as a music server with a nas eventually. Macbook headphone output vs external dac the art of sound. Play high sample rate digital audio on mac computers. Ive decided on the beyerdynamic dt 1990s combined with the schiit magni heresy ampand the schiit modi 3 dac. Tips to fix mac doesnt recognize external hard drive on. Select oyaide 18 diameter stereo plug when connecting. So if you plan to use the apple dongle on an android phone, you should do some compatibility testing. The only way you can get good audio out of a macbook, he said, is to add an external dac and do a bunch of stuff to make up for the problems that the macbook pro has. When i first started i ran audio through a marantz avr using the optical out for my macbook pro and do think it sounded great, but no where near the quality i got when switching over to a usb dac. Second is to play highdefinition contents in highdefinition dac for high quality sound. It measures approximately 2 18 by 1 18 by 38 and weighs under 4 oz. The reason youd get a dac today is that your sourcebe it your computer, smartphone, or home systemis introducing noise or incapable of outputting sound at the bitrate of your files.
Mac doesnt recognize external hard drive anymore and why your mac is not mounting or wont detect specific popular brand drives including seagate, wd, toshiba, iomega, lacie, and exfat. I would prefer that the dac would work right out of the lightning connection, but dont really mind if apple camera connection kit is required to make the dac work. Play high sample rate digital audio on mac computers apple. In most cases, the dac is built into the device youre using to listen to music tv, laptop, phone, or tablet, but this version is not optimized for the best sound quality. Question, should i use an optical cable from mac to dac cheap or a u.
I was wondering if there were any affordable improvements that could be made by adding an external amp dac. Aug 28, 2014 im considering buying a dac and i wanted to pole people on how significant a difference people think a dac can make. Play high sample rate digital audio on mac computers the audio hardware in some macbook pro, mac pro, and imac computers supports 176. This is especially true when you use highdefinition contents. Its a roonready streamer that operates on sonores sonicorbiter os, and supports bubbleupnp, ohmedia, squeezelite, dlna, tidal, qobuz and native dsd formats with select dacs.
Which gives some of the benefits of the encoding on nonmqa enabled hardware. How much real world difference in sound, if that noticeable, might even be debatable. I switched back and forth multiple times and really tried to find any differences but at that point its becoming just placebo. In some cases the internal dac in the avr will be better and other cases it will not. This can only be accomplished with a dac now that there is no optical output to get the full content of the source. There are several reasons why your mac wont recognize a drive. If it is visible, then click the option to mount, which should make it visible on the desktop and in the external drives option in the finder menu. Look at the back of the reciever and see what your connection options are, the front headphone jack is output usually. How s the sound quality output on a new macbook pro. This works in most cases, where the issue is originated due to a system corruption. Jan 27, 2018 i recently went from a macbook pro to an imac and on the macbook, it was connected to my arcam d33 dac via an optical cable via the headphone socket on the macbook but i have now discovered the headphone socket on the imac does not double up as an optical output like it did on the macbook. Anyone with a late model ipad or iphone please tell me what adapter i need from apple to bypass the internal dac to ifi xdsd dac, dragonfly red or any usb dac. As far as toslink versus usb is concerned, this is also dependent on the devices in question. I own a macbook pro inch 2018 and im going to upgrade to the 2020 one, is the dac good enough to play my flacs with a pair of ls50s or should i get an external dac.
Buying an external dac means the noisy environment in your computer wont mess with your music, though improvements will be minor. It has an additional lightning connector output to add power to the ipad too. Bearing a rather uninspiring name, this affordable external sound card will provide home theater audio support via an spdif output. Connecting my imac to my dac whats best audio and video. Macbook analogue output direct to amplifier result is actually pretty good. Jan 07, 2020 bearing a rather uninspiring name, this affordable external sound card will provide home theater audio support via an spdif output. Is it possible to get digital audio output from a macbook. All my music is stored in flac format on external hard drives.
Dec 09, 2019 apple products usually come with a decent built in dac function. How much do i have to spend on an external dac to outperform my. Has anyone compared the optical digital output from a mac with the usb output, using a benchmark dac with usb input or another dac with usb input. I am a beginner in the audiophileheadphones world and ive been browsing around the last few days to decide what my first purchases are going to be. Ive read that the air has a fairly good onboard dac better than most nonapple laptops. On the dac end, i have already used the only usb input. Aug 02, 2018 before trying any other solution, you must look on cable in most case usb cable which you are using while connecting the external hard drive to the mac. Ive tried comparing them and theres basically no difference, or at least no noticeable one. These blanket generalizations are just plain wrong. Im about to receive a new computer from work, for the first time a macbook pro instead of the crappy hp laptops i had previously.
The dac or digital to analog converter is a tool used to convert the digital audio signal into an analog one, so we can hear it in a proper format. The dragonfly red dac is compatible with number of devices and all the devices from apple and android can be connected to this dac. If the wire has defected, then mac wont recognize the external hard drive on mojave. Jan 28, 2020 the only way you can get good audio out of a macbook, he said, is to add an external dac and do a bunch of stuff to make up for the problems that the macbook pro has. If your music library is coming out of a macbook pro, the internal dac is already extremely good. When you wake your mac up, for whatever reason, your external drive does not wake up. This is apparently more complicated than i thought. The most benefit youll get from an external dac at this point would be a more efficient external amp and elimination of any computer noise. Maybe this has been covered before but i couldnt find anything. I know the audio lineout port on the macbook pro and even older macbooks and the mac mini sport a dual capability. If youre experiencing problems hearing sound or selecting a playback device on your mac, there are quite a few quick fixes you can try before heading to the genius bar. Disk utility is within system preferences, or you can find it using spotlight.
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