In this video, the Headphone Show team explores one of audio’s most persistent questions: whether DACs and amplifiers meaningfully affect sound quality, and if so, how much listeners should actually care. 

Resolve's Take

Once noise, distortion, and power requirements are met, most modern DACs and amps operate with measured behavior that should be inaudible for the vast majority of listeners. Most of the time, perceived differences stem from placebo effects arising from sighted listening, level mismatching, or output impedance interactions, rather than DACs or amps actually having inherent “sound signatures.” Through blind A/B testing, Resolve has come to the conclusion that even differences that seemed audible at one point ended up being rarely meaningful enough to change his opinion of a headphone.

Any audible difference should ultimately be explainable through measurements—and when it is, it’s usually tied to understandable engineering factors (measurable frequency response alterations, output impedance, audible non-linearity) rather than audio magic.

Above all, Resolve stresses that fixing headphone tuning (often via EQ) delivers vastly more benefit than upgrading source gear, such that if anyone is doing the latter without doing the former, they're leaving a ton of unutilized performance on the table.

Fc Construct's Take

Caleb describes himself as “source agnostic.” He doesn’t believe DACs and amps can never matter, but he also doesn’t see them as worth obsessing over once basic requirements—low noise, low output impedance, and sufficient power—are met. He acknowledges hearing differences in some sighted comparisons, including cases where less expensive or more portable gear outperformed pricier alternatives, but consistently characterizes those differences as subtle and low priority.

Rather than drawing hard lines around audibility, Caleb leaves room for individual variation. He suggests that some listeners may develop highly specialized sensitivities that aren't accounted for in the current discourse, and thus place value on differences others consider negligible.

For him, the key question isn’t whether a difference exists, but how much it matters to a given listener—and whether that difference justifies the cost.

GoldenSound's Take

GoldenSound is the most "source-interested" member of the team. That said, he argues that claims of “measurements prove it’s transparent” often gloss over how little we truly know about audibility limits, especially for wider-bandwidth signals, distortion types, high-order components, and non-standard test conditions. He points to people using measurements to inform blanket statements about what listeners can or can’t hear is, at best, oversimplified.

While he agrees that source gear (DACs and amps) matters far less than headphones, Cameron maintains that DACs and amps can influence aspects like spatial perception in ways not fully captured by frequency response alone. He advocates for blind testing and strict volume matching, noting how easily price and expectation bias distort impressions. Ultimately, his advice is practical: most people shouldn’t worry much about expensive source gear until everything else—headphones, speakers, room, and EQ—is sorted.

listener's Take

listener says the conversation usually goes one of three ways:

• people doing blind tests citing lack of difference between competently designed gear as evidence of "all sources being the same" 
• others doing blind tests hearing small differences between more measurably-flawed source gear, using this as evidence for the claim that "sources do have their own character"
• people doing sighted tests, which, while it does reflect how people most often actually use the devices, provide absolutely no evidence to answer the question how much DACs or amps actually matter
  

listener's take is that even if amps and DACs do have differences, they are incredibly unlikely to consistently affect listener preference, given how wide individual preference windows are for much more audible factors like frequency response. Additionally, at the music production level, listener says that minor changes in crosstalk (panning), distortion, compression, or frequency balance at the extremities of the human-hearing range are are almost never decisive when it comes to a mix being good or people enjoying the music. 

listener thinks that people who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on source gear without bothering to fix potentially massive errors in headphone frequency response are putting their eggs in the wrong basket. Especially because this way of thinking ends up giving a pass to manufacturers of headphones to not worry about making their headphones as good; listener says that people insisting on foregoing caring about frequency response, favoring "upgrading" their listening via amps & DACs are responsible for manufacturers getting a pass not to design better headphones, as many consumers will excuse lacking headphone performance if they feel they can "unlock" the potential with downstream gear.

Despite the firm position of source gear not being worth anywhere near its price for  sound quality improvements, Griffin offers a strong defense of source gear from a different angle: enjoyability of the experience. They acknowledge that owning visually striking or enjoyably tactile equipment can encourage intentional listening and deepen enjoyment, even if the sonic benefits are negligible or nonexistent. In that sense, DACs and amps can matter and be valuable to people—not because they unlock hidden performance, but because they enhance the ritual pleasure of listening to music.

Shared Ground: Headphones First, Sources Second

Despite their differences, the group converges on several points:

Modern source gear has improved dramatically, making large audible differences rarer than in the past.

Headphones (or speakers) and their frequency response absolutely dominates the sound of the system far more than DACs and amps ever will.

Expectation bias and placebo effects are powerful and unavoidable without blind testing.

Most importantly: listeners should prioritize headphone quality, tuning, and EQ long before considering expensive source upgrades.

For those who still want premium DACs and amps, the justification should be less about "unlocking" sound quality and more about usability, aesthetics, engineering appreciation, or personal enjoyment.