How digital EQ is applied

[Joffieb]

Hi All,

I am looking for a little bit of inside advice from someone who knows how these things work. I have a very basic streamer (the WiiM Mini), which has garnered rave reviews because it is bit perfect into a DAC. So even though it costs $100, if paired with a decent DAC, it punches well above its weight. They are however introducing a customisable 10 band EQ feature which I would love to utilise with REW. I am worried however, that by turning on the feature, it will degrade the quality of the file being sent to the DAC. As I am unaware how digital EQ works, for example like DIRAC, I would like to know if the component doing the EQ actually changes the content of the music file it is playing or if it adds a sort of tag that tells the DAC just to EQ the original file? If the latter, the EQ feature shouldn't downgrade sound quality too much.

Any advice would oblige.

Thanks!!

 

[Joffieb]

PS: To those who are able to answer the above, please tell me where I can go to learn all about DAC's and streams etc... too. Thanks

 

[John Mulcahy]

EQ changes the signal, that is its purpose.

 

[Joffieb]

EQ changes the signal, that is its purpose.

Thanks, but does it “open the file/signal”, EQ it and redigitize it and send it on or just tell the dac to add the EQ to the signal?

 

[dcibel]

In your case the EQ will occur in the digital domain, before the DAC. Depending on the implementation, there may be sample rate conversion involved in the process, which has varying degrees of degredation depending on the software or hardware that is completing the task. Playing audio from a PC for example everything gets resampled to the configuration of the audio device, otherwise the mixer and ability to play audio from multiple applications/files simultaneously presents a problem at differing sample and bit rates. It's usually very minimal and the benefit of the corrections that an EQ can apply generally outweigh the losses involved, which in most cases are completely inaudible.