a laptop DAC & an external DAC I have heard some godawful laptop DACs. We're not talking splitting audiophile hairs here, I'm talking night and day. I've also

a laptop DAC & an external DAC I have heard some godawful laptop DACs. We're not talking splitting audiophile hairs here, I'm talking night and day. I've also heard some great ones. In my experience Apple has always nailed this. Compared to a competent onboard laptop design (e.g. Apple) the audible difference with an external one will be more power, which is something a lot of pricy headphones benefit from. But for most normal headphones no, no huge difference. Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp? Speaker amps? A lot of expensive audiophile crap measures pretty poorly! However if you shop carefully you can get something like this, with objectively insanely good performance: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-and-measurements-of-benchmark-ahb2-amp.7628/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r... Is 0.000225% THD audibly better than 0.01% THD? Honestly, generally not in my experience. Your average room has probably 40dB of noise floor if not more and your speakers are distortion machines too. Do high-impedance headphones actually achieve anything ? I've never seen a solid case in favor of them. Do frequency response graphs mean anything if you can digitally EQ For headphones? If the flaws of the headphone aren't too wild, then yeah they can be fixed pretty well with EQ. The bigger the flaws the more efficiency/output you sacrifice so there are limits. And some flaws like a lack of deep bass can't be compensated for. For speakers? Yeah and no. With speakers most sound that reaches your ears is reflected. If your speaker's off-axis sound is markedly different from the on-axis sound, this severely limits what can be accomplished with EQ because we can't EQ them separately. You fix one and the other breaks. is digital-EQ fully lossless Depends on the implementation. Obviously, you could certainly screw it up. But I think popular implementations like EqualizerAPO and Apple's built in Audio Units seem to get it right within any reasonable definition of audibility. Are planar magnetic headphones a scam I dunno, they sound really detailed to me. I don't think they're a must-have, but I've been impressed by them. Is FLAC practically overkill for a human ? Very difficult to tell from e.g. 320kbps audio. However consider that your audio may be lossily compressed later on, e.g. for Bluetooth transmission. I think even 320kbps kind of sounds like ass once you lossy compress it again for Bluetooth -- like a JPG that's been recompressed multiple times. So considering that lossless audio isn't much bigger than 256kbps-320kbps lossy anyway, I think it has a lot of value.