Sennheiser PC37X randomly goes bad after disconnecting the cable ?
Greetings, Yesterday I was using my headset like normal with my macbook, just listening to music and on a call with people like usual, and the headset was perfectly fine. The stock wire that came with the headset is extremely long and yesterday it annoyed me very much that it kept getting tangled with itself, so I decided to see if the cable is replaceable. I pulled out the cable from the headset and saw the adapter, and looked online for a replacement. Upon plugging it back in, the audio sounded extremely muffled and washed out. Im not sure what I did wrong to make it mess up like that as I've always taken good care of it, ive had it for about 2 years and its always just been chilling on my desk, but anywho I thought the cable just went bad and ordered a replacement. The replacement came, and the issue is still persistant, so I am not sure what the issue is I've tried multiple different headsets and the issue is not with the port, and I also tried it with my windows laptop and...
Apr 23, 2024
It's kinda complicated, but in general no. If you are willing to spend >$200 on a good DAC then yeah there might be an improvement, but to be honest the built in DACs on newer (I know they were good as far back as 2014) mbps is phenomenal compared to the competition, and it will very likely out perform almost any sub $200 DAC.
I learned this the hard way. I bought an external DAC and as a test I tried a couple of "pick out the higher bitrate tests". I was better at it while using the internal DAC across the board.
Here is the thing. Apple cares very deeply about the audio quality of their devices because musicians are one of their primary targets. As a result they put in very, very good Dacs.
Apple actually designs quite a bit of custom silicon. They design the CPUs & GPUs in iPhones. They design custom controllers for Macs. Heck, they helped design the PowerPC CPUs with IBM and Motorola. I'm typing from a Gen1 MacBook now and the audio (output) hardware's manufacturer is reported as "Apple" in the System Profiler. That said, OS X isn't particularly clear about what they're referring to in the Audio output hardware section but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple designed the DAC themselves.
There are numerous examples of Apple doing anything but skimping on components. There's actually a reason why Apple computers generally cost more than what most people consider to be comparable PC hardware. They tend to pack more tech in that most PCs that they get compared to.
Going back to a new MacBook Pro.. is Apple skimping on components? the chipsets in every MBP models support NVMe drives that are on par with the best from Samsung, They support multiple USB-c & Thunderbolt3 ports, and even with the ATI mobile graphics (I'd prefer Nvidia) the laptops have the IO and ports to run two 5K monitors and two TB3 RAID cabinets simultaneously. Recent MBPs might not have the types of ports most people still prefer (USB type A), but they provide superior IO in terms of the number of high-bandwidth ports and total available bandwidth than any business-class laptop I'm aware of (I'm not particularly up on hot-rodded Gaming laptops though). They don't skimp on their other controller silicon and I doubt they're undercutting the quality of their DAC designs to save a few transistors and the few pennies (or fractions of pennies) on per-chip Fab costs.
And... yet it seems the latest MBPs now support lower bit-rate output than previous Apple DACs. I'm wondering if that's a software limitation (I've seen threads complaining about similar issues with older laptops when they had early dot-releases of new OS relases installed), or if it's a hard limitation of the new hardware. Apple's been getting worse with the quality of their major OS updates over the years and, though I would HOPE that we'd have all the major issues worked out of Mac OS 10.13 by 10.13.4, I wouldn't rule that out as a still-yet-to-be-addressed issue... or that what people are seeing is an App limitation, not a system limitation.
Still, if the new Apple DAC is hardware-limited to Lower sample rates, that'd be disappointing but it's unlikely that's because Apple wanted to save pennies on a cheaper mass-made DAC chip... It'll be because someone figured that's as much silicon as they wanted to run for their laptop DAC but they probably still spent a good amount of effort to make it a great sounding DAC at that rate.
I honestly think that decisions like any made around the on-board DAC are driven by more practical matters than shaving a few pennies off the bottom-line.. particularly when we're talking about the Pro lines. I suspect they'd take into account that serious users (like Audio Engineers) would connect their devices to superior external hardware anyway and that would factor into the calculations, but I don't think they'd cripple the on-board hardware just to save a few pennies, or even a dollar or two, on a $1500+ (average retail) laptop model.
Cheers, and my apologies if previous comment came across as harsh or defensive... Steven