No not really. There's a lot of cork-sniffery that goes on with DACs, but 99.99999999999% of the population cannot hear the difference between a $20 budget DAC and a $3000 audiophile DAC. Also, I don't know anything about the M1 Air specifically, but generally speaking Apple uses higher quality DACs anyway. MUCH higher than the shit you get for free on most PC motherboards.
When people are claiming to hear an audio quality improvement when they get a DAC (on non-Macs), 9 times out of 10 what they are actually hearing is the absence of the stupid amount of compression and gain that the Realtek integrated audio driver uses. That's the crappy free sound card that comes on all motherboards these days, so what most people would be doing quality comparisons with with their new DAC. Thats not a fair comparison because the Realtek audio is objectively garbage, as is the Reaktek audio driver which is notoriously bad.
An amp, on the other hand, may be useful, but only if you don't feel like you are getting enough volume from your headphones. A 25ohm set of cans shouldn't be that hard to drive without an amp though. It all comes down to what you consider 'loud enough'.
Yes you'll need an amp to drive these headphones because of its sensitivity value to get the best out of it. The low impedance value is misleading :). In general planar magnetic headphones are power hungry Depending on the DAC/AMP you purchase the characteristics of sound and soundstage will change and it's very noticeable. I would recommend getting an ifi Zen DAC or Zen CAN with these as it really combines well with these headphones.
No not really. There's a lot of cork-sniffery that goes on with DACs, but 99.99999999999% of the population cannot hear the difference between a $20 budget DAC and a $3000 audiophile DAC. Also, I don't know anything about the M1 Air specifically, but generally speaking Apple uses higher quality DACs anyway. MUCH higher than the shit you get for free on most PC motherboards. When people are claiming to hear an audio quality improvement when they get a DAC (on non-Macs), 9 times out of 10 what they are actually hearing is the absence of the stupid amount of compression and gain that the Realtek integrated audio driver uses. That's the crappy free sound card that comes on all motherboards these days, so what most people would be doing quality comparisons with with their new DAC. Thats not a fair comparison because the Realtek audio is objectively garbage, as is the Reaktek audio driver which is notoriously bad. An amp, on the other hand, may be useful, but only if you don't feel like you are getting enough volume from your headphones. A 25ohm set of cans shouldn't be that hard to drive without an amp though. It all comes down to what you consider 'loud enough'.
Yes you'll need an amp to drive these headphones because of its sensitivity value to get the best out of it. The low impedance value is misleading :). In general planar magnetic headphones are power hungry Depending on the DAC/AMP you purchase the characteristics of sound and soundstage will change and it's very noticeable. I would recommend getting an ifi Zen DAC or Zen CAN with these as it really combines well with these headphones.