# Plex and external DAC

**URL:** <https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-and-external-dac/701426>\
**Category:** Plex Labs\
**Created:** [March 18, 2021, 9:57am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-and-external-dac/701426 "2021-03-18T09:57:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Martynet](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/martynet/32/101535_2.png) [@Martynet](https://forums.plex.tv/u/Martynet)\
**Post date:** [March 18, 2021, 9:57am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-and-external-dac/701426/1 "2021-03-18T09:57:03Z")

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I do love Plex and Plexamp, but I would love it even more, if I could use external dacs on my mobile and destop devices and let the dac deal with all the decoding. Could you do that for us please? Thank you

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**Author:** ![elan](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/elan/32/5_2.png) [@elan](https://forums.plex.tv/u/elan)\
**Post date:** [March 19, 2021, 6:49am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-and-external-dac/701426/2 "2021-03-19T06:49:08Z")

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> [@Martynet](#):
>
> deal with all the decoding

Not sure what this means.

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**Author:** ![Martynet](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/martynet/32/101535_2.png) [@Martynet](https://forums.plex.tv/u/Martynet)\
**Post date:** [March 19, 2021, 11:14am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-and-external-dac/701426/3 "2021-03-19T11:14:29Z")

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It means, that if I play a music file (DSD format) on my Mac, which is connected to external dac, Plex does something to the file and dac doesn’t recognize it. My dac has a LED colour indicator and when playing DSD file from Audirvana player for example, it turns blue. But when playing same file throug Plex, it doesn’t. Which means that Plex is not passing the raw file to the dac. Let me know if that makes better sense. Thank you

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**Author:** ![elan](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/elan/32/5_2.png) [@elan](https://forums.plex.tv/u/elan)\
**Post date:** [March 19, 2021, 8:20pm UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-and-external-dac/701426/4 "2021-03-19T20:20:06Z")

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Gotcha, DSD. When we do source matching I expect this will work, as the FLAC decoded to PCM should contain the DSD extras needed to make the magic purple light 🟣

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**Author:** ![elan](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/elan/32/5_2.png) [@elan](https://forums.plex.tv/u/elan)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2021, 12:13am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-and-external-dac/701426/7 "2021-03-21T00:13:20Z")

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Sorry, I thought you were talking about MQA, which is embedded inside FLAC. We decode DSD and don’t have a way to pass that through.

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**Author:** ![system](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/plex/original/3X/2/a/2acb9765406f63293d357b4ec509ec39aa28f2ad.png) [@system](https://forums.plex.tv/u/system)\
**Post date:** [June 19, 2021, 12:13am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-and-external-dac/701426/8 "2021-06-19T00:13:36Z")

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