Hello from West Wales (UK). I've got my mid-range Android phone hooked up to a Fiio KA1 (entry level) DAC streaming Tidal into a Cambridge Audio A1 (£40 eBay) with some old Wharfedale speakers and I'm blown away with the sound I've got for less than four hundred of your dollars. No way can I afford (or want to afford) the eye watering sums hi-fi gear goes for ( though I've appreciated friends' systems, amazing) , but for a sixty year old with slight tinnitus this set up is doing it for me. I'd rather save my money and buy a vintage cd player to my 'system'.
I have a number of iFi desktop & portable DACs which I use with both my phone and my PC, and I have never been anything short of amazed with their performance. Thanks for all of the videos, Paul. You never fail to both entertain and educate. Sparks in Daytona
Just recently, Polish company Sisound and Extraudio from Netherlands presented the new R2R Dac 2 on Audio Video Show in Warsaw. It had an innovatiove bluetooth streaming option directly to i2s to dac and it sounded marvelous - from phone! It crushed me, as well as other listeners.
Another great video Paul! I'm glad that you're somehow aware of those chi-fi/mid-fi brands which I think enables us newbies or who wants to start this hobby, a bit more financially-possible. Please continue making these great videos and products. Hoping to visit PS Audio soon. Cheers! P.S. I think the brand you're referring to is Fiio, for anyone who's curious or not familiar. 😊
Nice video by Paul being honest about this topic. Awesome. I also have a FiiO DAC for my iPhone and it’s quite amazing what audio fidelity you can pull out of a modern phone with streaming.
Hey Paul, love the videos. The dragonfly actually works with iPhone. No problem whatsoever. My travel rig is basically an Qobuz, iPhone 13 mini, dragonfly cobalt and a pair of Grado sr250e. And it sounds freaking awesome
I bought a Motorola phone that I don't have service on just to use the LDAC with my Ifi Zen Blue. It's convenient as hell playing Amazon Music and it sounds way better than it should.
LG put a really good DAC in their phones and designed the operating system and the internal circuitry to optimise sound quality. Unforetunatly there was not enough interest in high quality audio from a mobile device. LG has now stopped making phones :(
I have and LG V60 8 found out that wonder Dac gets stepped on by the android operating system but I found a solution that Paul talked about done time its USB Player Pro it will by pass android and use the Dac or if you plug into your USB port for an external Dac it will pass through the music straight to the Dac makes your android an excellent music streamer
Hello Paul! I'm very glad that I found your channel, I'm always watching talk about Hi Resolution Audio, DSD's, FLAC and all that. I really appreciate what your doing here. I'm brazilian and here in Brasil, no much people are audiophiles like me. I learned alot from you and I hope you continue to do what you do best: teaching us about audio fidelity. Salutations!
There are many great mobile DACs I’ve used fiio for some years now, firstly connected to my iPod classic, Nano, then onto iPhone or iPad , more recently as the cost of mobile hi res is far closer to my financial pocket, I currently rotate via my iPad Pro using the Dragon fly Cobalt, The Chord Mojo,and the Oppo HA-2 . Wire these up to an ever growing number of headphone collections and there you have some of the best in house music streaming via Tidal or Spotify even tho Spotify doesn’t do above 320Kbps Thanks for your continued very informative videos Paul keep up your very much appreciated work Thanks and regards Alan. Aberdeen Scotland
Random note that's almost on topic: The DACs in some tablets are surprisingly good. I have a 2017 Ipad Pro that sounds great as a DAC. The NVidia Shield K1 Tablet also has a really good DAC. My newest tablet is a Lenovo Tab Pro 11, and it doesn't have a headphone jack at all.
I have a 2020 iPad Pro without headphone jack. But I can hook up the USB C to 3.5mm jack or I use it via usb with my audio interface which goes up to 24-bit/192 kHz. It’s amazing. Thanks to the core audio support from Apple natively built in (that’s also inside your iPad Pro).
Great video, thank you Paul. I plug my iPad or my iPhone plugged into my DAC from Amazon Music HD. On the go , I run IEM’s on an IFI Go Blue 😋.Bluetooth from my iPhone again Amazon Music HD and it sound amazing. I guess if your DAC is good it doesn’t matter where it gets it’s ones and zeros from 😊
Phone is the best streaming device in my experience. And you can control it with a smart watch from a coutsch and that’s it. Throw a great sounding DAC in the mix, like the Chord Mojo or Hugo, set the output level of the DAC to a line-out standard level, and you’ll leave most music streamer devices in the dust. I compared it A to B many times.
You’re talking about $800++ DACs, so of course they should sound great. Also, controlling music from a watch is possibly the least desirable method I can think of lol.
Phones don’t have any ac-dc conversion so less rfi noise than cheap streamers. A lot of RU-vidrs endorse the raspberry pi (standalone) but in my experience it’s not as good as a phone once you have bitperfect usb. My favourite so far is mconnect straight to my expensive streamer over dlna. When you get streamers with linear power supplies and class an output stages things change the other way. I just bought the ALLO digione signature and I’m going to upgrade from WiFi to Ethernet upnp with Audirvāna and I think Audirvāna sounds a bit better than mconnect although not by that much
I'm right behind you in age, and also an early adopter. I had one of those early car phones, which was considered portable. It had a huge built in battery that was charged through your cigarette lighter or AC adapter / power brick. I frequently use my smartphone to connect to Classic FM. It's an app on my phone that loads Global Player. From that I use Bluetooth 5.0 to stream to my receiver. Very convenient, and I love this UK station.
USB-C or Lightning into a DAC USB in, should work fine. You could even power it at the same time with a USB splitter, but that would probably affect sound quality. How well it works will be dependent on your phone and USB implementation in the DAC.
I have the fiio BTR 7. Can be used as a usb c DAC, or Bluetooth! Using it with LDAC Bluetooth codec it sounds amazing! Drives any headphones with ease!.
It's the Fiio BTR 5 which connects to your phone via USB C or IOS cable and by -passes the internal DAC in your phone. You can then connect your headphones wired or via Bluetooth to the Fiio BTR5. In Bluetooth mode it will transmit in APTX HD for better than CD quality and has met certification for both HiRes audio and HiRes wireless audio. In Australia it retails for around $200. Fiio is a Chinese audio company with agents worldwide including Amazon.
thank you for helping me to have deeper insight into this. what if one uses iphone internal bluetooth could you help me to understand this some more please?
Streaming by phone, to me, is using the phone as a remote to control my Volumio streamer. This has the added advantage that the phone can go to sleep and preserve it's battery.
It's so true that smartphones today are used more as tools for everyday things rather than actual phones. And maybe it's just me but I always use my M1 MacBook Air for streaming music rather than my iphone or iPad. If I'm mobile, my airpods - or whatever I'm using - is good enough. But for serious listening, I need to be seated so I can focus on the music which is why I like having a laptop and dedicated IEMs/headphones/amps/DACs, even though mobile devices are fine for that too.
"F.I.O. - FIO" 🤣 Oh Paul, FiiO is the name, and yes they are nifty little devices. I got the BTR5 and can stream up to* LDAC quality (if I had the hardware). With a strong signal it works very well. You do get interference from overhead power lines though. Intense pops. Scared me half to death when I tested it at my old rural property. I often stream through AirPlay at 44.1 max through my phone or iPod touch. I have some files which exceed that, so minimal worries there. You're right about phones hardly being phones anymore... That's why I got an iPod touch, so no one could interrupt my portable music playback.
You can also get a otg adapter for your phone to access USB audio. This allows you to connect to any external DAC with USB audio. Audioquest makes type c to b cables. To connect directly with a solid wired connection. For Android users. Don't even know why cheap streamers exist when you can get that kind of quality out of today's phones.
The DAC manufacturer is named Fiio, with double "I", and not like Paul said. They have a lot of products, for example I use their BTR5, it's a DAC and amp device that can be connected to the phone for via a cable for the best fidelity, or you can connect it via Bluetooth
Right on. If you think of your smart phone as simply your all-in-one mobile computer system... then yes it can be anything. I use my smart phone as the remote control to my audiophile system. Interchangeable with my laptop that also performs that task. It can be anything you want as long as you don't expect its onboard DAC to do the work. You can do that, but then your audiophile system is governed by the performance of a DAC optimized for MP3 in a noisy environment.
Bluetooth 5.3 is a gamechanger.Streaming LDAC and AptxHD at over 100feet wirelessly from the daily phone is the simplest ways to enjoy music. No more finnicky remotes and unintuitive app integrations.
My iPhone is my main source for digital stream. Bought the best USB cable possible, and connect it direct to my Topping u90 usb bridge and I2S out and into my SMSL m400 then into my tube integrated amp . Sound great to me
If you know a little about a phone, you know that people often use bluetooth for music. Bluetooth has been designed super cheap from the start. Bluetooth always uses a codec to transmit audio data. since bluetooth does not have enough capacity to transfer uncompressed data. bluetooth always has sound loss! I have also heard a gaming laptop with worse sound than a Samsung S8 has out of the ear phone line out!
@@ZeusTheTornado Despite its lossless branding, aptX Lossless isn’t entirely compression-free. There’s still some compression at work here to bring 1.4Mbps CD-quality audio down to the 1Mbps bit-rate that aptX Lossless is capable of transmitting. But the difference here is that the compression being used shouldn’t result in any loss of data, and is “bit-for-bit” exact. “After it’s uncompressed it’s exactly the same as the original,” Nura CEO Luke Campbell says, “Think of a ZIP file. It gets smaller, but it’s exactly what it was when it comes out.” To my ears, aptX Lossless appeared to provide a small-yet-noticeable impact on audio quality. It wasn’t a night and day difference (turns out Bluetooth audio compression really has gotten pretty damn good in recent years), but they were the kind of minor differences that are enjoyable to pick out in familiar tracks. A little extra clarity here, a little extra depth there.
I ripped all my OG vinyls to DSD, and play those files from my phone through it's USB out using USB pro app on my android, to a stand alone Shiit DAC ...same Vinyl warmth with no digital harshness or brightness,. My ears, my room, my system, my happiness 😊
For all the respect and gratitude I have for Paul, he showed his weakness here in a well intentioned but poorly informed opinion. Nowadays, the portable DAC market is full with so many options that are way better and in some cases cheaper than the dragonflies and/or Fiios. All people need to do is a bit of research and if possible try different options but, never forget that in the end, the choice is not about specs but personal preferences. Also, if you can afford it, you can stream from your phone to a device such as the PS Audio Sprout 100 and then to midfi speakers, and I can assure you, it sounds terrific! Is it perfect, of course not, but, is it enjoyable? Hell yes!
Good info - however, I think the primary answer should have been using your phone, similar to an iPad, to run a native tidal/etc “connect” mode for hi-fi streaming should be just as good as Roon, or otherwise. Far as I know.
HIDIZS s9pro dac balanced and single ended is on that works great it will even sound better than most desk top DACs $116 and it will change colors to let you know what speed your recordings are running .. much better clock than the iPhone you can immediately tell the difference in sound quality and it’s an amp also since it will play single ended or. Balanced it’s a fantastic dac just to use for full size headphones.
Any iPhone without a headphone jack doesn’t have a DAC anymore. The cheapest DAC and amp for iPhone is funnily enough the Apple Lightning to 3.5 mm adapter. They cost only $9.99. It can go up to 24-bit/48kHz. Fiio is a brand that’s available in my country for many years now. They’re great and very affordable. And they can deliver a higher sample rate than the Apple adapter. I’m eager to try one, but I already own a high quality professional audio interface with ADAM Audio monitors. Great video, Paul. Like your channel a lot! Hi from The Netherlands.
Every smartyphone has a dac 🤦🏽 When you play music from x service do you hear 1s and 0s or audio? That involves digital to analogue conversion So unless it’s some internet free dumb phone device that won’t play music, it has a DAC ffs
@@emiel333 ohh I can definitely read... Your words, "Any iPhone without a headphone jack doesn’t have a DAC anymore." That's 100% false. The lightning port may output digital, but if you look on the bottom of your iPhone you will see speakers...now how do you suggest sound comes out of those speakers without a DAC? The irony of your calling *me* illiterate is not lost on me. Maybe learn some manners eh. ecch
Paul I'm not to far behind you in age. I use my android and Pandora to stream my music to my my chromecast to my Denon and l'm a happy listener. I have a beautiful home audio system that hardly gets used now except for movies. My point streaming makes it to easy to sit back and be lazy. And the sound is quite decent and l can take it to my SUV and travel! My times have changed. 🙂
I use my IPhone 13 Pro connected to a DDC via USB and then I2S into a R2R DAC and it sounds pretty good. Since Apple Music is hi res , you need an IOS device. Ofc you can use a Mac but in MacOS you need to manually adjust the resolution in Audio Midi settings every time, until they come up with an update. I think Apple M is more consistent than Tidal. Haven’t tried Amazon streaming yet. And there is no Qobuz where I’am. But I only pay US15/yr for Apple M.
@@georgemartinezza A wide variety - jazz , house , hip hop , 80’s , audiophile recordings like Chesky , some commercial , non commercial , ethnic , chill , ….
The point is, HiFi is available to almost everyone nowadays. With just an (literally) 'in line' dac thats baked into the cord, and some decent headphones. In 2 to 5 years this will also disapear; we're just a few bluetooth versions away from perfection. Then its just a decent bluetooth headphone (good dac and good drivers). Cables truely wont add anything at a certain point.
These phones have been both a blessing and a scourge to our modern society. For home use, its far better to utilize the phone as a remote controller for a stand alone streamer than to stream directly from the phone to your rig. For mobile use, Paul is absolutely right, grab a Dragonfly or a Fiio and youll be glad you did!
Sounds like some of you can’t part with their phones for the time they listen to music🤭. Well use a tablet and a DAC then, connect them with a usb cable (and a so called camera adapter if you use an apple tablet/phone). Trust me it’s worth trying it out. And some great dacs can be got for like 200 bucks used. Can’t think of a better investment sound-wise.
I use the app USB Audio Player Pro and connect my phone to a Schitt Modi 3+ into a Marantz SR6011 to JBL Studio 590 loudspeakers. Does anyone see any gaps apart from higher quality equipment? The audio player app has a setting to turn off any internal DAC and send the info to the Schitt. I have that setting turned on. Thanks for the video as always Paul. Take care.
If streaming apps on the iPhone have the ability for exclusive mode then that would be a game changer! There is sound quality difference between the tidal app in windows using exclusive mode versus the tidal iPhone app which does not have the exclusive mode. Sending the correct sample rate to the external dac improves sound quality.
Didn't see any love for the Soundblaster Play the C version is 20 bucks the USB is $17. It's not bad on a Chromebook not all of us are inclined to spend big bucks on a DAC per the comments. There are some cheapies that do a respectable job rather than a phone I'm thinking I'll buy another small Chromebook you could use its extra USB for a powered DAC. Getting really decent sound for not much money is totally possible now and a thrill of its own. Newer Chromebooks have Play Store but still only about 50 bucks on Woot.
You have to differentiate between controlling and streaming as a source If the stream is wireless then the DAC inside the phone is not engaged right, it’s the device you are streaming to that decodes and reproduces the audio signal?
Yes, you are correct that if you are using bluetooth audio for example, it's the DAC in the receiving device that's used. Also, Bluetooth audio is compressed and has sample rate, so it might be reducing your sound quality. Using a high res service and then sending it over bluetooth is actually a little silly. As a side note, "casting" is different than that. What a chromecast does is actually send the URL of the stream to the chromecast and then the chromecast streams the audio directly from the internet. There was a device called a Chromecast audio that had an optical output that could be sent to a great DAC and sounded amazing. Unfortunately, Google killed the Chromecast audio, like they do every product they make that's not successful, so mine is now a plastic paperweight, and not a particularly good one since it's so light. ;-)
@@georgemartinezza Or for people who want to maximize what they already have instead of buying and spending money on things that aren't completely necessary
Why has the resolution gone down from 4K to FHD 1080p in the videos? FYI: Many phones dhoot RAW these days. I think Samsung or LG was one of the first to do it.
If you really want a high quality DAC, go for the Chord Mojo II. It is on a whole different level from DragonFly. It is a bit larger, but is still semi-mobile
My question is the same, only, sending the signal into a streaming amp, and then to speakers; Not to headphones. What's the recommendation, then? Sending Amazon Prime music (HD and ultra HD) to an Arcam with built in APTx
If you are going into an integrated amp or AV receiver the key is to just somehow bypass the phone's internal DAC. With an iPhone you can do this by using a lighting to HDMI adapter and then connecting directly into the integrated amp HDMI in (if it has one) or the AV Receiver HDMI-in (all semi-modern AV receivers have HDMI in). Another option for iPhone X and newer and many AV receivers from the last ~5years is to use Apply Airplay 2. Airplay 2 converts any streams to apple lossless 44.1kHz digital audio to be transmitted over your home's wifi network. Some people say they have had issues with this though, YMMV. The HDMI route should work well though, it is digital and has the bandwidth to deliver high quality audio.
If you're using an Apple device for its camera.. how would you avoid the AI post-processing.. or is it because shooting raw you can just strip it out from the data.. which is actually kind of nifty when you think about it that is something that could totally be done.. I don't know if I would think that Apple would be the one to do that.. it's going to be interesting to see how those images come out, especially if they do have a way to just actually get the blank raw.. be an interesting experiment in AI automatic processing as well, if you can have the image be AI processed in the metadata, turn it off and on and see what changed.. my only real worry aside from you know touching anything involving apples ecosystem ever again would be the viewfinder lying to me about the actual image itself in its raw form if it's automatically processing it.. Interesting divergence in technological pathways, I always thought AI cameras were really frustrating and annoying.. then they made the regular camera even more frustrating across the board it seemed.. so just to take a picture if you wanted to do anything quickly you just all right whatever it's the first one that comes up despite having set all my manual settings don't have time to cycle through five menus etc.. and now it's the selling point essentially because it's so good that it was basically what they did instead of an actual camera upgrade.. which makes a lot of sense of course given Samsung can cram as many megapixels into a sensors they want but they're not really changing the size of the sensor, which is where you get all the actual granularity in many cases.. you're going to have to let us know how it goes LOL... Honestly it blows my mind that I'm holding a 1440 piece screen in my hand that's an OLED 6 and 1/2 in across.. to have a just a focus monitor of this quality screen would have cost thousands of dollars 10 years ago.. although in all fairness, that focus monitor doesn't break itself out of software updates back then although I bet the new ones do LOL...
Just a quick question, since I'm a streaming newbie. I have Qobuz on my MacBook, and connecting it via USB to my Sprout100, which has a very good DAC built in. Is there anything else I need in the middle, or is this setup sufficient for good sound? The Sprout100 is being used as a preamp to my Schiit Vidar and Magnepan .7s. Thanks for the weekly PhD course in Audio, Paul!
Ok, I gotta make a comment. Warranty AND compatibility are something one would want to take into consideration. As good as you can get things to sound even old phones being used... the devices are beginning to change. I think audiophiles have moved away ( as much as possible) from using phones as a do it all device. I'm as frugal as they get. 😕 😁 ( in my opinion )
I'm no streaming expert and I could use some advice from some experts out here. Currently I'm using roon on my desktop with qobuz as my streaming service and then have an USB from my router to a microrendu as my roon endpoint and then going into my mytek manhattan ii dac and preamp via USB cable. I use my phone to control the roon and stream like that. Would it be possible to just stream qobuz on my phone and have a cable that would go into the dac to just use my phone for the stream like I'm using roon. Would it be the same quality as my current setup or less if there is a way to do it with my Samsung note 20. I'd like to eliminate roon and the microrendu if possible but I still want to have the best quality with what I have. Any advice is appreciated
I don't think you answered this fully. I have the Sprout 100 and I Bluetooth music to it. I assume I am sending the music file bit perfect to the Sprout 100 and it's DAC is playing the audio. Correct?
Worth noting that unless you use a third party app to bypass the operating system that both Android and IOS will both output at 48khz only, no matter what the resolution of the stream is.
To continue your off topic tangent, most modern phones (past 5 years) do actually have the option to shoot pictures in RAW format, Apple just advertises it more heavily.
@@mmmbbq if I had to guess I think they want to give users flexibility with cropping. It might also be an aspect that helps with low light performance which is a competitive area right now.
@@soulshinobi That would be some really extreme cropping. I guess I was just shocked when he stated over 40MP on a phone camera. Not to mention all the extra storage and having to process all those RAW images. Lets be honest, It's marketing to sell higher MP cameras to people who just think more is better. How many people are making giant sized posters with camera phone images and not real cameras anyway?
@@mmmbbq I haven't looked into the new iPhone but I wonder if the spec is actually an accumulation of all the different sensors rather than a real value of an individual sensor?
Hi. Writing to you from London, England. I'm an electronic music nut. Is there any advantage in listening to this stuff on vinyl? As it's all digital in the first place. All the best.
AppleTV 4K maxes at 48. To get higher you need an iOS device and dac. Apple Music will go to 192 that way. It’s odd that Apple would enable a feature that requires a third party device they don’t make. I even tried going from iOS directly to avr via usb and it was a no go. Had to use an external dac to use hirez Apple Music.
