Ableton Live with external DAC

[J.R.]

Hi,

Kindly ask for your help regarding external DAC with LIVE.

I'm on a Macbook Pro 15" i7 running Live 9 Suite.
When it comes to recording of guitars and voice I am using RME UFX Audio Interface and get very good results.

Away from the studio, I am on LIVE for beat production and use this terrible Headphone jack of my Macbook Pro.

I am thinking to buy
- Violectric V850 DAC from Lake People
https://www.thomann.de/gb/violectric_dac_v850.htm

and would connect my
- Lake People G103-S Phoneamp + AKG K702

Two questions:
Can I expect better results?
If I use the export feature of LIVE, are the created files also processed by the DAC or is the DAC only for playback?

Thank you!

Best regards
Roman

[jlgrimes]

Hi,

Kindly ask for your help regarding external DAC with LIVE.

I'm on a Macbook Pro 15" i7 running Live 9 Suite.
When it comes to recording of guitars and voice I am using RME UFX Audio Interface and get very good results.

Away from the studio, I am on LIVE for beat production and use this terrible Headphone jack of my Macbook Pro.

I am thinking to buy
- Violectric V850 DAC from Lake People
https://www.thomann.de/gb/violectric_dac_v850.htm

and would connect my
- Lake People G103-S Phoneamp + AKG K702

Two questions:
Can I expect better results?
If I use the export feature of LIVE, are the created files also processed by the DAC or is the DAC only for playback?

Thank you!

Best regards
Roman

Can I expect better results?

Maybe. Could more of the problem be using headphones than the output of the Mac. It is possible the Mac's output truly are crappy, but I don't know how much a high end DAC improve things. Better headphones might be a better option (unless the Mac's output impedance isn't designed for your headphones. AKG 702s are probably good headphones but don't know much about them. I tend to can't stand headphones anyways for mixing.

If I use the export feature of LIVE, are the created files also processed by the DAC or is the DAC only for playback?

DAC is only for playback. In theory the DAC will affect what you hear so if your DAC is horrible, you could be making bad production/mixing decisions. In reality though whats more important is usually Speaker quality, headphone quality, acoustic treatment. Once you got those areas of improvements, you probably could start looking at DAC quality to improve the accuracy of your monitoring.



Reading up on the AKG 702s, they seem to be high end headphones but their impedance might be a bit too high for laptop outputs. So maybe the DAC can drive the 702 better. Low impedance headphones work better for laptop outputs which probably can't properly drive a high impedance headphone.

[Tarekith]

An external DAC will give you better results than the standard headphone output for sure, if nothing else it'll have more power to drive your cans. I use a Dragonfly Red if I have to use a DAC when travelling and need accuracy, it's nice and compact and sounds decent for the price. Though I do admit, for my own music making on the go, I actually think the built in soundcard on my MBP is decent enough most of the time. My headphones (Shure SE846's) are a bit easier to drive than the ones you're using though.

[JAMM]

The MBP minijack output sounds fine but i use the apogee groove for playing live.
Some times i use the minijack output because its easy and on most shitty PA systems i don't hear a big difference.

[J.R.]

Thank you for getting back and useful information. I just ordered a Apogee Groove.
Best regards, Roman

[Dr. Zoiberg]

The MBP minijack output sounds fine but i use the apogee groove for playing live.
Some times i use the minijack output because its easy and on most shitty PA systems i don't hear a big difference.

Are you using the Groove with a macbook? how is latency?

[blandroid]

Hey all.

Do you guys know if this bad boy https://ifi-audio.com/products/zen-dac-v2/ will work with Ableton? No audio card? That would be rad.

Thank youuu!

[Tarekith]

A DAC IS an audio card FWIW. The biggest thing to check with smaller brands like this is their driver support, are they releasing updates frequently?