Headphone Amps

You probably can tell the difference in 1 dB volume levels, but can you reliably tell the difference in 0.5 dB volume levels?

Can you hear all the way up to 22 kHz? What about at or below 20 Hz?

You can probably hear an absolute 54 dB of dynamic range in your environment, but can you reliably hear 78 dB?

For reference 16-bit audio has roughly 96 dB of dynamic range. Twenty-four-bit manages a theoretical 144 dB, although it's almost impossible to achieve more than 120-130 using real-world ADCs.

Eight-bit audio has a dynamic range of "only" 48 dB; can you reliably tell the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit audio? [This is a real idiot - of course you can - test.]

Play all of these tests at maximum digital volume. Just be aware that they're not designed to be scientific, but rather to give you some perspective. Try them out for yourself and feel free to post your results in the comments section below!"

As optical storage fades away, we believe PCs will increasingly become the center of the hi-fi listening experience. Nothing can match the accuracy (bit-perfect sourcing and streaming, and no degradation over time) and convenience (thousands of losslessly-compressed albums a mouse-click away) of PCs. Today we even demonstrated that a $2 codec is sufficient for driving some of the most expensive headphones in the world. We haven't tested this yet, so we can't say with certainty, but a DAC hooked up to a PC should also drive amplifiers and associated full-sized speakers as well as the DACs built into, say, high-end CD players. For PC enthusiasts, that convergence is just one more reason to love our versatile systems."

Tom's Hardware - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/high-end-pc-audio

JP 2015/09/22
www.hifiart.ca