BEST AUDIO CONVERTER PORTABLE

They pay off, as the DAC's current What Hi-Fi? Award-winning status demonstrates. It’s what iFi has done with its budget home DAC and headphone amp offering, with the original Zen DAC now making way for a ‘V2’ model that offers improvements in terms of processing, MQA decoding and circuitry. But at the same time we realise that in a competitive industry such as hi-fi, making the best even better off your own back isn’t necessarily a bad idea. The ‘if it ain’t broke…’ saying isn’t lost on us.

BEST AUDIO CONVERTER PORTABLE

The very best DACs, such as those listed below, will make your hi-fi, desktop or portable audio system sing, but something sub-optimal – or sticking to the ones used in regular do-it-all components like those mentioned above – will prevent you from getting the most out of your set-up. So they play an instrumental part in making digital music worthwhile for many of us. Indeed, without a DAC your digital music collection is nothing but a sizeable collection of “0s and 1s” that makes sense only within the digital domain. (Essentially, if a digital device has a headphone jack or another audio output, know that it has a DAC built-in.) Any device that delivers digital sound – be it a laptop, games console, portable music player or phone – requires a DAC to convert its digital audio to an analogue signal before it can be output to speakers, headphones or another analogue device. You might not realise it, but most of us make use of at least one digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) every single day.

Best audio converter