I’m new to the audiophile world. I just purchased a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pros yesterday. They sound great, but I was expecting more after reading reviews. I have no experience when it comes to picking up audio cues and analyzing music. Would a dac/amp make a noticeable difference in sound quality to an untrained ear? Right now I have them connected to a TC-Helicon Goxlr. Is the built in amp strong enough to efficiently power them? Or, would a real amp be a significant upgrade/worthwhile?
Imo, in general, the biggest lift in quality you’ll ever get will come from avoiding an analog link between the source and the amplifier, and not having the noise-filters intended to handle that applied to the output. I’m not sure how the Goxlr works, but think it’s a mixing thing for multiple inputs? So it probably has some filters, a range limit, and a pre-amp that will shear off the edges a bit, and put a generally clean sound out. That probably also applies if you’re running usb input for the playback as well.
If you compare that to having some usb-c put to a pre-amp or a dac that has minimal range enough to drive the speakers (200Ohm?). And that also does nothing to the output other than convert it. Or, you have an hdmi-input to an amplifier that just amplifies. Then you’ll hear a difference very quickly.
It won’t be huge. But having a pass-through analog cable to an amp really requires you to add a few filters and tune the input to not get kind of crappy sound, regardless of setup. A mixing board needs to do certain things to the signal on the way. While just tuning the output at the end of a converted digital signal is sort of impossible to get wrong.
So that’s - I think at least partially - why this stuff is somewhat controversial. Because it is the case that with tuning options and mixing possibilities, you can make a lot of things sound significantly less bad if you mix it well. Like one of the sound-tuning wizards I knew that mixed for the local bands - he always managed to do… something, either live or on the recordings that would salvage what was absolute crap to begin with. And it was really impressive. But he would never claim or say that anything of what he did was somehow getting the best sound that could be reproduced. He made that point a few times, that he was pulling filters to bring out certain things to produce a particular sound-picture that would work on the speakers, not that he was somehow drawing on the knobs and getting some magical state where all the waves mathematically align and becomes perfection.
So being able to remove that part of the equation with the analog inputs and the balancing - and preferably also the noise-filters that are in there to avoid amplifying the noise from mixed inputs - is kind of where it’s at, imo.