Just curious if it’s substantially higher or lower quality than the Realtek ALC1220 in my motherboard (not interested in studio quality DACs, I know it won’t compare to that).
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Hi @ialexryan,
We use Nuvoton NAU8401.
Wherever it’s a higher or lower quality DAC chip than Realtek ALC1220 is another question. This is probably something me and Niraj will need to test out internally and get back to you.
EDIT: Are you also able to confirm by what you been by ‘higher quality’?
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There’s a spec sheet (PDF) on the chip that provides some technical detail.
Things like noise and harmonic distortion would probably be influenced to some degree by the Spectrum’s other circuitry, so the spec sheet may not tell the full story.
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Thanks for the quick and specific response @MarvyMarvz and the link @NZgeek! Exactly what I was looking for. I agree that the question of whether one DAC is “better” than another is complicated, to say the least, but now I have the info I need to start investigating! 
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For whatever it’s worth, I can’t tell the difference between eve spectrum audio out and the headphone jack on my mac mini, so if your worry is that it’ll be noisy trash, you can relax about that. The Audio is good. If i crank my speakers up to their highest amplification level (ear splitting if music was playing) I can just slightly hear little high frequency chirps, but at normal volume levels I don’t bother turning my speakers off when I sleep in the same room as it, and I’ve never noticed any irritating electrical noise. Seems like they did a good job.
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