After a week of trying my new LCD X plugged into a Magni, I was getting mixed results. Some songs sounded great, but others sounded a little off on their balance, separation and clarity.
I ordered a cheap adapter on Amazon and plugged my LCD X into the headphone jack of my MacBook Pro 2022. Much to my surprise the sound is night and day, the depth, separation and clarity are suddenly on par with what I was expecting from my LCD X.
Why would this be the case?
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Cough cough. You don’t need a dac any more and only need an amp if your headphones are harder to drive. Cough* internal DACs have become much better in the last 3 decades* cough.
you have to be careful doing comparisons because it’s actually pretty difficult to volume match and we basically can only recall the general tone/pitch of an audio sample and even then it’s only in any sort of detail for like 12 seconds.
it’s unlikely it sounds worse or better but the magni 3 can absolutely handle almost any eq you can dream of on the audezae while the macbook cannot.
Is it 12 seconds? I read it was even shorter than that.
The issue might be poor contact of you cables.
Expectation and placebo, or your amp was manufactured wrong. Or your ears are magical who knows.
I had my wife perform a blind test for me and every time I picked the mac. I did buy the magni second hand from Facebook marketplace - so it’s possible I have a bum unit I guess…
Yeah I had a somewhat similar experience in that my Scarlett 2i2 sounded no different to a topping DX3 pro+ which I bought and swiftly returned
Any of the MacBooks released in 2021 onwards have a high impedance 3.5mm output. Joshua Valour tested the LCD X at around the 6 minute mark of the linked video and said it was impressive even compared to his Fiio rig.
Do you know why schitt call it the heresy?
Macs have great internal DACs.