Will getting a DAC converter improve mp3 playback

Acura1947,

If you listen to mp3, an external DAC or Blue Circle USB thingy will be an absolute overkill and a waste of money! Such things are for lossless formats, not for compressed one. On the other hand, if you have no access to lossless files (which seems strange to me), I can understand your desire to get the best out of mp3 files. I was myself in the same situation 5 years ago. Here's my advice to you: find an old Sony DVD player DVP-NS330 or newer models of the same series. I have NS330 and I can tell you that the quality of this Sony's inbuilt mp3-decoder is magical. I don't know what this Sony does to mp3, how it converts it to pcm and how it treats it further before it finally comes out of its analog outputs, but the result is just stunning! In the true blind tests, I and my friend compared the audio-cd tracks, played by cd-player NAD C521BEE against the same mp3 files (lame, 320 kbit/s) played by Sony DVD player DVP-NS330, and in 50-70% cases we couldn't tell the difference! The amplifier used was NAD C320BEE and the speakers were Acoustic Energy Aegist Evo 3. This Sony just refines mp3 sound somehow, making it sound rich, full-bodied, etc. The drawback was that this dvd-player could read mp3 from a dvd media, only from a cd.

When tried to play mp3 files through my current $700 DAC, $1000 preamp and the same NAD amp, it sounded worse than that Sony NS330.

Another curious thing about this NS330 is that it played Audio-CDs noticeably worse than mp3 made from the same CDs! I am not kidding, we also confirmed it, together with my friend, in blind tests.

Acura1947!

The above sentence in my earlier post should read “The drawback was that this dvd-player could NOT read mp3 from a dvd media, only from a cd.” Sorry, my mistake.

I can't believe you cannot find lossless in the internet! You must be looking at wrong places. I have an unlimited internet at the office and even though the bandwidth allocated to me is small (3-7 Kb/sec, i.e. 24-56 kbit/sec), by downloading day and night I get more lossless hi-quality exclusive hard-to-get music than I can physically listen to at home!

If you still insist on mp3, try to understand that mp3 playback consists of two stages: First, mp3 signal must be decoded into raw pcm. Secondly, this pcm is then converted to analog signal by a DAC. The DAC does not decode from mp3 to pcm. So, if the decoder algorithm in your source is lousy (and they do differ in quality!), DAC will not help you.

Forget about mp3! It’s a thing of the past. Also, if you have 100 GB of mp3 files in your computer, and if they are normally, like you said, 192 kbits/s, then you have music to plan non-stop for 50.5 days (I’ve just calculated). If you listen to music (non-stop) only 3 hours per day, it means you need 404 days to listen to your collection at least once. I am sure there are some albums which you listen to at least 2-3 times, right? What I am trying to say is that considering the availability of music in the internet, it’s useless to “collect” music as we did in the past. What people lack nowadays is free time (to listen to music), the unavailability of music itself is not a problem. But collecting music steals our time. Just my two kopecks!