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What are high quality/minimalist speakers for Mac?
- Thread starter mason.smith1975
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I’m very happy with my AudioEngine A5+ Speakers. But if you don’t want speakers looking like speakers they may not be for you
Yeah they're too big for my table though
I already have two HomePods, but I can't use two of them in stereo mode as Mac speakers
LOL, A5+'s are compact, but not quite minimalist. Do you run them through a DAC or straight out of the headphone jack? I have an AudioEngine D1 DAC that I've been using for years, but it ran into some audio stuttering issues on my 2018 MBP so I decided to try the headphone audio straight out.
I have to say that the MBP's built in DAC has really caught up. I don't think I need my Audioengine D1 anymore, but I think my ES100 Bluetooth DAC might still be adding something. I haven't taken the time to determine if it just sounds better because it's passing the audio through an equalizer or if the DAC is actually still a signal upgrade. Regardless, I don't think it's a huge difference anymore.
Depends how you define minimalistic. They're minimalistic in the sense that a minimal amount of work has been done on fancy aesthetics and they just look like speakers rather than a sci-fi obelisk or whatever modern day smart speakers are going for. Utilitarian minimalism.
I run them through an iRig Keys I/O. Used to just plug them in directly, wanted a MIDI keyboard and now everything just goes through it, so speakers, guitar, microphone, etc. - Honestly sounds identical to me whether it goes through the keyboard's DAC or the built-in one. Always thought Macs have had good built-in DACs. They're capable of 24-bit 96khz (used to even be 192khz actually).
I've also had a little USB DAC that's nothing but a DAC. Got it before the MIDI keyboard, when the audio port in my iMac died. It had several EQ options as well as just a clean signal passthrough. For the clean signal I'd say it was in fact a downgrade from what was in the iMac. The EQ options were just annoying, haha.
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If you like them but size is the only prohibiting factor there's a smaller A2+, but high quality audio does require drivers of a certain size (relative to the acoustic space you're trying to fill)