DAC (with Bluetooth)
Discussion
All digital devices (laptops, phones, tablets, CD players etc) and Bluetooth receivers of course convert Digital to Analogue.
Is the technology different and is there an appreciable sound quality (to a non-serious-audiophile) difference between the various devices available nowadays?
Eg. An Ifi Zen compared with a £25 one?
Is the technology different and is there an appreciable sound quality (to a non-serious-audiophile) difference between the various devices available nowadays?
Eg. An Ifi Zen compared with a £25 one?
At the heart of an audio 'DAC' box is generally a DAC chip.
A high quality DAC chip won't cost a manufacturer more than a few dollars.
There are some good performing cheap DACs out there, but there's also some rubbish.
I have a Prozor DAC with Bluetooth which seems to me to work entirely fine, but others of this brand have been tested and appear to be fundamentally dire. The main IC in mine has quite an old date code on it, so maybe they've changed?
People are sniffy about Bluetooth anyway, but for the ordinary person the sound degradation it might bring is probably inaudible below the sound of traffic three streets away or the birds in the garden, way below the noise my keyboard makes as I type this.
The problem is, if you try to make a well engineered DAC from a $5 DAC IC etc, you need to sell many thousands of them to get the price below £100.
I'm inclined to suggest splashing £15 or so on ebay or Amazon, you should get your money back if you're genuinely dissatisfied.
If you want to know how good bluetooth can be, a friend of mine has a pair of Sennheiser headphones which give amazing clarity to TV sound. About £150 I think?
Like DACs, I think it's possible to implement bluetooth badly, both at the transmit and receive ends.
A high quality DAC chip won't cost a manufacturer more than a few dollars.
There are some good performing cheap DACs out there, but there's also some rubbish.
I have a Prozor DAC with Bluetooth which seems to me to work entirely fine, but others of this brand have been tested and appear to be fundamentally dire. The main IC in mine has quite an old date code on it, so maybe they've changed?
People are sniffy about Bluetooth anyway, but for the ordinary person the sound degradation it might bring is probably inaudible below the sound of traffic three streets away or the birds in the garden, way below the noise my keyboard makes as I type this.
The problem is, if you try to make a well engineered DAC from a $5 DAC IC etc, you need to sell many thousands of them to get the price below £100.
I'm inclined to suggest splashing £15 or so on ebay or Amazon, you should get your money back if you're genuinely dissatisfied.
If you want to know how good bluetooth can be, a friend of mine has a pair of Sennheiser headphones which give amazing clarity to TV sound. About £150 I think?
Like DACs, I think it's possible to implement bluetooth badly, both at the transmit and receive ends.
Re. Bluetooth receivers, you need to consider not just the DAC but also the codecs it is able to support, and perhaps the effectiveness of the antenna. I recently swapped a generic Logitech receiver for an iFi one. The latter does offer a better DAC, but more importantly offers better codecs at higher bitrates. It is miles better.
TheInternet said:
Re. Bluetooth receivers, you need to consider not just the DAC but also the codecs it is able to support, and perhaps the effectiveness of the antenna. .....
This is true.Bluetooth is a whole family of protocols.
Various bitrates, qualities etc. AIUI, sometimes it reduces bit rate and quality as the range increases and the signal strength decreases, so a better antenna or shorter range can give better audio.
TheInternet said:
Re. Bluetooth receivers, you need to consider not just the DAC but also the codecs it is able to support, and perhaps the effectiveness of the antenna. I recently swapped a generic Logitech receiver for an iFi one. The latter does offer a better DAC, but more importantly offers better codecs at higher bitrates. It is miles better.
Interesting, thanks. I have posted in another thread about my Nobsound amp (with integrated 36V power supply and three tone knobs). When I tested it, via Bluetooth and plugged in, streaming Spotify by WiFi, the sound quality appeared good to me in both cases.
I also have a very cheap ZK-MT21 Bluetooth 2.1 Class D amplifier in a home-made portable boom box powered by a 19V supply. The amp sounds much better than I expected to, good to my ears, via Bluetooth and plugged in.
I have just bought another ZK-MT21 for use with the kitchen DAB module (easy for everybody to switch on/change channels, and I am retro-fitting the DAB and amp into an old Pure DAB radio case to please my wife) and Android tablet media player.
Even this cheap amp driving a pair of Mission 701s and a small sub streaming music via wifi sounds really good to my ears. DAB obviously typically a lower bit-rate.
I would like to listen to different bluetooth 5.0 receivers and DACs back to back as a comparison.
OutInTheShed said:
At the heart of an audio 'DAC' box is generally a DAC chip.
A high quality DAC chip won't cost a manufacturer more than a few dollars.
There are some good performing cheap DACs out there, but there's also some rubbish.
I have a Prozor DAC with Bluetooth which seems to me to work entirely fine, but others of this brand have been tested and appear to be fundamentally dire. The main IC in mine has quite an old date code on it, so maybe they've changed?
People are sniffy about Bluetooth anyway, but for the ordinary person the sound degradation it might bring is probably inaudible below the sound of traffic three streets away or the birds in the garden, way below the noise my keyboard makes as I type this.
The problem is, if you try to make a well engineered DAC from a $5 DAC IC etc, you need to sell many thousands of them to get the price below £100.
I'm inclined to suggest splashing £15 or so on ebay or Amazon, you should get your money back if you're genuinely dissatisfied.
If you want to know how good bluetooth can be, a friend of mine has a pair of Sennheiser headphones which give amazing clarity to TV sound. About £150 I think?
Like DACs, I think it's possible to implement bluetooth badly, both at the transmit and receive ends.
The Prozor DAC was the £25 one I had seen and prompted my question.A high quality DAC chip won't cost a manufacturer more than a few dollars.
There are some good performing cheap DACs out there, but there's also some rubbish.
I have a Prozor DAC with Bluetooth which seems to me to work entirely fine, but others of this brand have been tested and appear to be fundamentally dire. The main IC in mine has quite an old date code on it, so maybe they've changed?
People are sniffy about Bluetooth anyway, but for the ordinary person the sound degradation it might bring is probably inaudible below the sound of traffic three streets away or the birds in the garden, way below the noise my keyboard makes as I type this.
The problem is, if you try to make a well engineered DAC from a $5 DAC IC etc, you need to sell many thousands of them to get the price below £100.
I'm inclined to suggest splashing £15 or so on ebay or Amazon, you should get your money back if you're genuinely dissatisfied.
If you want to know how good bluetooth can be, a friend of mine has a pair of Sennheiser headphones which give amazing clarity to TV sound. About £150 I think?
Like DACs, I think it's possible to implement bluetooth badly, both at the transmit and receive ends.
The built in Bluetooth & DAC in my home amps seem good to me, hence wondering what improvements could be made, and also whether it was worth investing much for older analogue amps.
Yes it would be nice to test some parts back to back.
One time I had two systems set up.
CD, amp, speakers.
One set in the upstairs room, one in the dining room.
I could say they sounded different, but which was better?
I think 'old analogue amps' can be very good. The technology of analogue 'class B' amps of the standard architecture using discrete power transistors has been plenty good enough for a long time. But how do you know if your old amp is working as well as when it left the factory, or as well as its designer achieved on the bench? I've got a spare amp in the loft which has clearly degraded over time, something isn't right, but it still basically works. It would be very easy for a fault like that to be just bad enough to convince people that new tech was better.
There were a lot of cheap amps about last century, so some were never that great and some lacked power and distort if you try using them in a room bigger than a student's bedsit.
One time I had two systems set up.
CD, amp, speakers.
One set in the upstairs room, one in the dining room.
I could say they sounded different, but which was better?
I think 'old analogue amps' can be very good. The technology of analogue 'class B' amps of the standard architecture using discrete power transistors has been plenty good enough for a long time. But how do you know if your old amp is working as well as when it left the factory, or as well as its designer achieved on the bench? I've got a spare amp in the loft which has clearly degraded over time, something isn't right, but it still basically works. It would be very easy for a fault like that to be just bad enough to convince people that new tech was better.
There were a lot of cheap amps about last century, so some were never that great and some lacked power and distort if you try using them in a room bigger than a student's bedsit.
I just changed from a £15 Amazon bluetooth receiver to a Wiim Mini which is a streamer i.e. it receives music via WiFi not Bluetooth. It sounds a lot better, firstly because there's no Bluetooth and secondly because it has a better DAC. Also I suspect a audio £80 device will have marginally better hardware than a generic £15 BT receiver / transmitter, although I'm under no illusion that its anything fancy.
In short, if you've got WiFi coverage in the area and you want to stream music with your system sounding as good as it can sound, get a WiFi streamer not a BT receiver. I do recommend the Wiim mini.
In short, if you've got WiFi coverage in the area and you want to stream music with your system sounding as good as it can sound, get a WiFi streamer not a BT receiver. I do recommend the Wiim mini.
HustleRussell said:
I just changed from a £15 Amazon bluetooth receiver to a Wiim Mini which is a streamer i.e. it receives music via WiFi not Bluetooth. It sounds a lot better, firstly because there's no Bluetooth and secondly because it has a better DAC. Also I suspect a audio £80 device will have marginally better hardware than a generic £15 BT receiver / transmitter, although I'm under no illusion that its anything fancy.
In short, if you've got WiFi coverage in the area and you want to stream music with your system sounding as good as it can sound, get a WiFi streamer not a BT receiver. I do recommend the Wiim mini.
That's interesting!In short, if you've got WiFi coverage in the area and you want to stream music with your system sounding as good as it can sound, get a WiFi streamer not a BT receiver. I do recommend the Wiim mini.
A little question for you.
Can you use it in Windoze?
Say I'm sat at my Win10 PC, watching/listening to some band or other on Youtube, could I play the sound through the hifi in the lounge, if that had a Wiim?
I've got WiiMini as a Spotify Direct and Bluetooth device for an old amp, I'm using the optical audio out so it's using the amps DAC rather than its own.
Great device for extending the life of my old equipment.
Chromecast audios sell for quite a bit now since they were discontinued but this serves the same purpose they did for hifi.
It's got Bluetooth so you can connect you PC using that, but Spotify Direct also works on it which is like a direct link to Spotify rather than Bluetooth (much better audio quality and you don't get any interruptions in the sound from your phone or PC pop ups like you do with Bluetooth.)
Think it also works with audio stored on your home network but I haven't experimented with that yet as Spotify quality is good enough for the system this is connected to.
Great device for extending the life of my old equipment.
Chromecast audios sell for quite a bit now since they were discontinued but this serves the same purpose they did for hifi.
It's got Bluetooth so you can connect you PC using that, but Spotify Direct also works on it which is like a direct link to Spotify rather than Bluetooth (much better audio quality and you don't get any interruptions in the sound from your phone or PC pop ups like you do with Bluetooth.)
Think it also works with audio stored on your home network but I haven't experimented with that yet as Spotify quality is good enough for the system this is connected to.
Edited by Byronwww on Saturday 18th March 19:43
MC Bodge said:
The old Android tablet I use as a media player (only BBC and Spotify installed) in our kitchen serves a similar purpose. It works well, and no notifications etc.
Mrs S quite often listens to BBC stuff on an ipad in the kitchen.It seems a small step to bluetooth that to the the kitchen amp/speakers, and then another small step to simultaneously share it with some other speakers,
The barriers to sharing music around a home Wifi network seem entirely artificial?
OutInTheShed said:
MC Bodge said:
The old Android tablet I use as a media player (only BBC and Spotify installed) in our kitchen serves a similar purpose. It works well, and no notifications etc.
Mrs S quite often listens to BBC stuff on an ipad in the kitchen.It seems a small step to bluetooth that to the the kitchen amp/speakers, and then another small step to simultaneously share it with some other speakers,
The barriers to sharing music around a home Wifi network seem entirely artificial?
Higher spec DACs are worthwhile IMO. A while ago I made a kit based on Wolfson's WM8740 DAC chips which you can find over on Head-fi (Jambo DAC). The performance of DACs is measurable, and people can talk about the different DAC topologies ad nauseum.
Taking a simpler view, it stands to reason I think that you'll get a better result with a DAC chip that might cost a few quid and which is designed for only that purpose, has properly isolated digital and analogue power supplies and decent external decoupling components etc., as opposed to a corner of a chip that is doing a hundred other things, has no external components, needs to have a battery life of several days and cost less than $1 for all the functionality.
Diminishing returns as ever though, and only you can decide where you preferred cost/quality/faff compromise lies.
Taking a simpler view, it stands to reason I think that you'll get a better result with a DAC chip that might cost a few quid and which is designed for only that purpose, has properly isolated digital and analogue power supplies and decent external decoupling components etc., as opposed to a corner of a chip that is doing a hundred other things, has no external components, needs to have a battery life of several days and cost less than $1 for all the functionality.
Diminishing returns as ever though, and only you can decide where you preferred cost/quality/faff compromise lies.
Jambo85 said:
Higher spec DACs are worthwhile IMO. A while ago I made a kit based on Wolfson's WM8740 DAC chips which you can find over on Head-fi (Jambo DAC). The performance of DACs is measurable, and people can talk about the different DAC topologies ad nauseum.
Taking a simpler view, it stands to reason I think that you'll get a better result with a DAC chip that might cost a few quid and which is designed for only that purpose, has properly isolated digital and analogue power supplies and decent external decoupling components etc., as opposed to a corner of a chip that is doing a hundred other things, has no external components, needs to have a battery life of several days and cost less than $1 for all the functionality.
Diminishing returns as ever though, and only you can decide where you preferred cost/quality/faff compromise lies.
I agree.Taking a simpler view, it stands to reason I think that you'll get a better result with a DAC chip that might cost a few quid and which is designed for only that purpose, has properly isolated digital and analogue power supplies and decent external decoupling components etc., as opposed to a corner of a chip that is doing a hundred other things, has no external components, needs to have a battery life of several days and cost less than $1 for all the functionality.
Diminishing returns as ever though, and only you can decide where you preferred cost/quality/faff compromise lies.
Plus, if you look at a quality bit of kit based on a typical DAC IC, it will have some filtering and buffering in the analogue signal path after the DAC.
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