this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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You want a bluetooth DAC. FiiO makes some decent ones. Only downside might be audio latency, but the quality should be there for budget audiophile headphones like the HD6XX
Audio latency isn't a priority for me, and since you mentioned it i've looked into the codec available (both on the phone i want and the dac) and it seems like FiiO is a very good option.
Thank you very much for the recommendation.
That won't give good quality because the phone sending the signal to the DAC is sending a poor quality signal. Sending a poor quality signal to a high quality DAC won't give you good audio.
However, all OP needs is just going to be a usb-c to 3.5mm audio jack to plug his headphones into. It will have pinouts for analog signal within the USB-C (USB c standard is specd to include analog stereo).
The issue still remains that most phones have a lower quality DAC. Ones that are only good enough to provide good quality for bluetooth devices. The last phone line I know of that had a really good DAC built in there the LG V series phones (v20, v30, v40, v50).
How exactly would it be poor quality? You do understand that there are multiple codecs to choose from using Bluetooth, right? The codec impacts both quality and latency. Also, Bluetooth is a digital signal. The signal either gets sent or it doesn't, so whether the signal is "quality" should not matter.
Bluetooth isn't capable of higher quality audio transfer. Codecs by design remove portions of sound data with their compression and decompression. That's literally why they exist. You lose some quality. They just try to remove portions of audio you don't usually hear, but it is noticeable with high quality systems.
It's why your typical compressed digital song you get a hold of is around 2 1/2 MB. That's its hacked down form. You can get "lossless" songs at full quality, but the sizes will be closer to 30 MB. Bluetooth and the DAC's together can't handle that. If you want high quality, you can't use bluetooth.
The "digital" signal your talking about with Bluetooth is just that. A digital one, and that digital one is a conversion from the dac that dumbs the audio down into what can be sent and processed back in a timely manner.
Going from your phones dac straight to an analog system to wired headphones cuts the conversions needed in half. Instead of going from the phones dac to Bluetooth to the wireless headsets dac to the speakers, you just go from phones dac straight to the speakers. Your phones has a lot more space than those tiny earbuds, so phones will generally have a much better dac than the bt earbuds will. That's on top of the transfer limitations of Bluetooth.
Short and simplified version: your phone can have a better dac than bt earbuds and wired headphones allow you to skip over half the conversion and transfer process.