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Comment by nwallin | Hacker News Reader

Audiophiles won't use onboard audio. An unshielded DAC in the electrically noisy environment of a motherboard (or worse, SOC) is bad juju.

It's measurably worse than a cheap but isolated and shielded external DAC.

Measurable with an oscilloscope though. Not your ears. pfft. Audiophiles.

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> Measurable with an oscilloscope though. Not your ears.

Admittedly I’m running a pretty budget setup, so modern systems may have improved measurably, but I’ve noticed on both my desktop and my laptop (with 2010 Intel 5 Series chipsets) the onboard audio line out gets really noisy, so much so that I can hear different kinds of buzzing when I move the mouse and scroll :) Wouldn’t call myself an audiophile by any means either, haha.

Some devices have decent analog outputs. Apple's had a good history with their laptops. Most suck, all of the pi's analog outputs suck, there's too much noise and they don't have proper amp circuits and so aren't able to maintain full frequency response under a load. I wear IEM's that are extremely sensitive, so any noise gets picked up inside the system if it's not well isolated, yet because of the earlier mentioned problem they won't get full bass response. This leaves the sound very thin and noisy.

But that wasn't even my point. My point was: Any sort of sound being sent out of the device should be digital (pci-e to a sound card, USB to a headphone DAC, or HDMI/toslink/coax to a receiver). All of those options mostly eliminate the noise problem when done right.

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