Massdrop 101: What Is A DAC?
With millions of songs at our fingertips every minute of every day, it’s easy not to think about where our music comes from—and how exactly it gets to us. The truth is that whenever we play a song on our computer, MP3 player, tablet, or any other device, the music undergoes a complex (but nearly instant) process of conversions, adjustments, and modifications before it hits our ears. One of the most important steps in this audio playback chain is the conversion from digitally stored files into analog signals. The Digital Revolution Before internet streaming and other modern technologies came around, everything we heard was stored physically. To save a song or another piece of audio, you needed physical space and a tangible format to store it in (think records, tapes, eight-tracks, and the like). When a signal was recorded, it was saved in analog format, which uses continuously varying signals to represent the fluctuations in air pressure produced by the original sound...