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Comment by aquir | Hacker News Reader

I would rather buy a Dragonfly DAC for my phone. I had a FiiO but the problem is that you have 2 devices to charge and copy music to. I am using a Dragonfly Black with my laptop and I am recommending it to everybody. It's around £100 and the difference in the audio quality is lightyears or even parsecs from any internal soundcard.

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I'm always wary of claims like this as there's so much snake oil targeted at audiophiles that I can never tell if the product offers a genuine improvement or if it's an expensive placebo. Would you be able to tell the difference between this and e.g. an iPhone DAC in a blind test?

I second this. Personally I can't tell a Dragonfly from a Fulla 2 from a Fiio E10K from anything else. Well, my Fulla 2 is louder in its left channel and crackles when I change the volume. But no discernible difference in 'quality'.

I don't know how good the iphone DAC is compared to the dragonfly, but I could easily tell the difference between my macbook dac and an external $100 DAC.

I believe you are sincere. But I think that if you were able to run a sufficiently rigorous blind test (note: precise level matching is critical) you'd surprise yourself.

IIRC FiiO makes BTR3/5 Bluetooth DACs. You can use those to bluetoothize your high end headphones as well as a USB DAC.

Just remember that depending in the bluetooth features the sender and receiver each support, you may end up with horribly compressed audio.

Apple devices will always use AAC codec if I remember which is is not only compressed, but will also try to compress with lower bitrates than say a regular mp3 cbr compression by judging which parts of the audio signal can be compressed more heavily according to what we should be able to hear. I think apple devices do not support lossless bluetooth.

Android devices were known in the past to use a bitrate that is dependant on the amount of processing power the encoder gets assigned from the system. This means that on some phones with power management that is not designed with encoding for bluetooth in mind you would end up with horribly low bitrates because the power management would take away processing resources from the encoder to save battery. This of course would not apply to lossless codecs, if the sender and receiver support them both and the software picks it up correctly.

I’m not quite certain if I’m spreading incorrect information as it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at the subject. I thought for a given bitrate AAC produced measurably better results than MP3. I wonder does the iOS Bluetooth audio stack transcode existing AAC audio to a lower bitrate or does it pass it through?

You are right though, iOS devices don’t support anything other than AAC or SBC over Bluetooth. MacOS devices do seem to additionally support AptX, but none of the low latency or lossless variants.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Apple planned to roll their own AAC lossless codec given the movement of Spotify to lossless streaming, leaving Apple with no high tier offering.

Yes iOS devices use AAC but a better implementation so it's not that bad.

I do the same with a Radstone EarStudio ES100: https://earstudio.store/products/es100

You can also use it on your desktop/laptop which may have outdated Bluetooth hardware as a transmitter to your modern Bluetooth headphones.

They also have a BTA30 which allows me to add bluetooth to my PC and listen via LDAC to my sony headphones

FIIO has some nice build products. I have got a FIIO BTR1K which works well as a bluetooth mic as well as making my IEMs wireless. The measurement results for their products are not always that good. Check audiosciencereview.com . This might not matter that much because these days DACs are so accurate anyway that most of the differences are not audible anyway.

I can recommend the FiiOs. The built in mic is also good quality. I have used both the FiiO BTR1K and the Dragonfly Red as a DAC and the Dragonfly does some sort of dynamic range compression (introduced in a later firmware) that I don't like.

This wired-only M3K could be good for environments which don't allow wireless devices. Hopefully the claimed 25hr battery life will enable a week of intermittent use.

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