Most audio originates as analog sound waves — vocals, instruments, etc, and recorded/encoded into 01010101’s. It’s up to the playback device to turn those back into something our ears can hear — anytime you plug in headphones, RCA or speaker jacks into an audio source that is the “analog” side of the product that runs the digital signal through some king of DAC (Digital to Analog Converter). The burden falls on the DAC designer/manufacturer to recreate the digital sound back to it’s original analog sound wave we can amplify and hear with our ears.
As you can imaging, there is a lot of technology and art that goes into this. Wolfson is a very well venerated DAC manufacturer that offers many types of DACs and we’ve chosen the WM8741 which is their “flagship” DAC — top-of-the-line — most expensive — best signal-to-noise-ratio — adjustable filters. What it all means is that the analog sound coming out of the device is “gorgeous”.
There are a lot more components that can make the sound even better. Like the type of capacitors used, power supplies, ground planes, etc — all that goes into creating a great audio device and we feel we’ve done that!
The reason why devices are so inexpensive these days is that a they are mass produced in China and use parts that are “good enough” for the masses. We wanted to deliver the best possible sound and give full control of the device to the user, hence Myro:Air was born.