How come people start hearing higher quality with some kind of 24 bit DAC instead of the usual 16 bit?

The answer to this question, like the answer to many other questions, lies in the workings of the human brain. You can easily realize that, in fact, music exists only in our head and consciousness already receives it in a processed form from the subconscious. The subconscious mind, in turn, has an incredible effect on how we see things (literally). And everything that passes through the senses passes through the subconscious without fail.

So the wine for $ 10 seems tastier than the wine for $ 1, although in fact, both there and there the same body is poured. We fully understand that price does not mean high quality, but when we don’t think about it, the brain can very easily fill in the picture in the way it thinks best. And the subconscious mind is capable of operating with very complex structures, much more complex than the price of the product. Marketers know this very well. An old way to sell a pig in a poke, like an expensive DAC, is to compare it to a conventional audio system, but in the case of an expensive DAC, also increase the volume of the audio recording by 0.2 decibels. People do not consciously feel the difference, but the subconscious senses it. At the same time, it’s been known for a long time that people like louder music better. This is how an expensive DAC starts to sound “better” than usual.

The same goes for other components. So people believe that the sound has improved by replacing the USB cable. Or they think that tube sound is better than electronic. In fact, tube amps sound different than electronic ones, but that doesn’t mean that one is better or worse than the other. But without thinking, many, recognizing the “warm tube sound”, immediately prefer it to any other, although it can be emulated in electronic components with equal success.

And to me, in principle, I do not care, but I let them not dirty other people’s brains with these opinions. Better to let them honestly say they like this type of sound and stop saying it’s better.

The most surprising thing to me is that there are even people among audiophiles who pathologically hate digital sound. When digital sound first appeared, everyone from audio engineers to musicians was delighted with its quality. Before its introduction, all analog media were loud and wore out over time. It was impossible to listen to your favorite composition without the crackle or background noise, typical of vinyl records of that time, which was heard many times.

Digital sound on audio discs was perceived as something from another world: for the first time, music could be heard in perfect quality, without any external noise. And this recording could never deteriorate over time and could be transferred to other people via electronic means of communication without loss of quality.

But an extremely low percentage of people perceived this new digital sound with manifest horror. Digital sound sounded so unusual to them, used to analog recordings, that it seemed to them that the melodies with which they were familiar had lost their depth and familiar atmosphere. Just as some people long ago believed that photographs took people’s souls away, early audiophiles believed that digital recording took people’s souls away from music.

This trend continues to this day, although few have seen it in such extreme form. But its main meaning remains, the soul of the music needs to be returned. It doesn’t fit in 16 bits and 44.1 kilohertz, it needs 24 bits and 192 kilohertz. Some also need ritual items like gold wires or server-sized DACs. Some people use ultra-precise watches (oscillators) worth several thousand dollars, which they could not find useful in any professional study. Others diligently determine the processor load during music playback, believing that this affects the quality (in fact, the only thing the processor needs to do is take time to decode the music stream into an uncompressed format and poison it in the DAC before de as it ran out of data to convert and all modern processors cope with this without a problem). The list goes on and on, it would suffice for a series of articles.

Naturally, dozens, if not hundreds, of companies whose activities border on actual fraud benefit from all this. Ordinary people suffer from this too, sometimes spending several thousand dollars on a DAC that has no meaning to them instead of buying high-quality speakers for the same money.