DO YOU NEED A PORTABLE DAC?

New headphones at the ready? Should you add a portable DAC to get the best from your phone?

You’ve sourced the best music you can, put it onto your iPhone, found an app to play it and now all you need to do is pipe it into your head through your nice, new headphones. You might think that the job was done. The only trouble is that the quality of your smartphone’s internal DAC might be the weak link that gets in the way.

The arrival of the iPhone 7, for example, saw the disappearance of the 3.5mm jack from Apple handsets. Anybody wanting to plug their headphones into their mobile, from those handsets onwards, needed to use Apple’s Lightning-to-3.5mm adaptor. That’s absolutely fine if you’re using a lower-end streaming service or playing MP3s, but anyone aiming for high-res audio should be aware that the DAC inside the adaptor will only output audio at a maximum of 24-bit/48kHz.

That’s a pretty high ceiling but it’s a downgrade for those using Tidal Masters, for example. If you want higher bit-depths and sample frequencies into your ears, you’ll need Apple’s Lightning-to-USB camera adapter instead, along with an external DAC.

Carrying around an extra lump in your pocket isn’t ideal for mobile music but choose something like a Chord Mojo or Dragonfly Black and it’s a box of just 5cm in length, weighing around 20g. Go for thes nazzy new ifi hip DAC (pictured above) and you’re up to 10cm and 125g. Whatever your choice, make sure that it gives you a reading of the audio quality that it’s outputting. Then you can be sure of the audio quality you’re receiving.

If that sounds a little too much, a neater option is to find a pair of headphones with a Lightning connector — no need for an adaptor at all. There aren’t vast numbers of these, though, and besides, it’s near impossible to judge the DACs within them, because you can’t isolate it from the headphone performance. But we’ve heard great ones, such as the Lightning+DAC cables Audeze offers for both on-ear and in-ear headphones, and which can then be trialled against standard cables using the phone’s DAC. They did well enough to grab one of our awards a few years back.

However you choose to listen to music on the go, bear in mind that, as good as these services and headphones are, smartphones are often not hi-fi. They have many other functions; they aren’t optimised for audio. So don’t drive yourself crazy trying to make everything perfect. That’s what your home listening room and high-res collection is for. If you want that level of quality on the road, start looking at high-res portable players (Astell&Kern’s SA700 pictured), which are built for audio quality from the bones up, without the compromises inevitable in putting your music inside a communications device.