If hooked up to an external DAC and all it does is transporting 1s and 0s digitally, how can that affect Soundstage, how punchy the bass is, etc?
If hooked up to an external DAC and all it does is transporting 1s and 0s digitally, how can that affect Soundstage, how punchy the bass is, etc?
The digital transport is just one part of the equation. There are long analog signal chains before anything reaches the ADC including microphones which vary wildly in how they transform sound waves into analog signals on a wire. Then the digital transport usually uses compression which can change audio audibly depending on the bit rate. Then the opposite of the ADC chain happens at the DAC side of things. The thinking that “it’s digital so nothing changes” is far too simplistic.