This is a review and detailed measurements of the Fiio BTR3 portable USB-C Dac and bluetooth wireless receiver. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $60 from Amazon including Prime shipping.
The form factor is the typical "belt clip" style:
Note that unlike DAC dongles, the BTR3 has an internal battery so can run without a wire using Bluetooth streaming.
Standard 3.5mm headphone jack and USB-C is provided:
There are switches on one side which requires reference to manual to decode. There is a very nice LED that is color coded to indicate Bluetooth codec chosen. Love this!
Fiio BTR3 Measurements
I connected the BTR3 using a USB cable and made my usual measurement:
This is disappointing on multiple fronts. The biggest issue is the output voltage of just 0.9 volt. I thought this was a mistake and looked up the specs and indeed, this is the maximum output available. This will significantly hurt the power availability for high impedance headphones. Many phones and dongles produce 1 volt by themselves which means using BTR3 would be a step backward!
SINAD is dominated by distortion and a couple of strange spikes up high. This was only there when I streamed using my Roon player and exclusive mode WASAPI. When use AP analyzer as a source, it truncates the bits to 16 which creates a different (instrumentation) problem. But oddly, those spikes disappear. Can't figure out what is going on there. Anyway, using AP SINAD rose to low 90s (not shown). Anyway, ranking is poor relative to other portable dongles and adapters:
Dynamic range is poor both at full and 50 mv levels:
50 mv noise level is quite high relative to other products tested (101 to date!):
This means if you use sensitive IEMs, you may hear background noise.
Jitter test made no sense whatsoever:
Reconstruction filter is typical slow one:
We care the most about power so let's sweep that starting with 300 ohm load:
As predicted, there is hardly any power there:
It is not much better at 32 ohm either:
Let's hope dynamic power is better than this in listening tests.
Fiio BTR3 Bluetooth Streaming Measurements
Since many people will use this with Bluetooth, let's stream some bits to it using the best codec available, LDAC:
There is no penalty for using BT which is nice. Dynamic range likewise is similar:
Fiio BTR3 Headphone Listening Tests
As usual I start with my Sennheiser HD650 to test ability to drive high impedance headphones. As one would predict from the measurements, there is just no volume here. Bass is anemic as a result and overall sound is bland even at maximum volume. Switching to low impedance Drop Ether CX resulted in similar experience. Disappointing all around and not at all what I expect to hear from an add-on device for portable listening.
FYI above testing was performed using Roon my Samsung player streaming LDAC (same was used for measurements).
Conclusions
I have gotten tons of requests to measure the BTR3 so I take it that it is quite popular. That led me to think that it would perform well and was quite surprised to discover range of performance issues both objectively and subjectively. I like the functionality and such but if you are going to carry something extra, it needs to outperform what comes out of a portable device or a $9 dongle. Sadly we don't have that.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Fiio BTR3.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The form factor is the typical "belt clip" style:
Note that unlike DAC dongles, the BTR3 has an internal battery so can run without a wire using Bluetooth streaming.
Standard 3.5mm headphone jack and USB-C is provided:
There are switches on one side which requires reference to manual to decode. There is a very nice LED that is color coded to indicate Bluetooth codec chosen. Love this!
Fiio BTR3 Measurements
I connected the BTR3 using a USB cable and made my usual measurement:
This is disappointing on multiple fronts. The biggest issue is the output voltage of just 0.9 volt. I thought this was a mistake and looked up the specs and indeed, this is the maximum output available. This will significantly hurt the power availability for high impedance headphones. Many phones and dongles produce 1 volt by themselves which means using BTR3 would be a step backward!
SINAD is dominated by distortion and a couple of strange spikes up high. This was only there when I streamed using my Roon player and exclusive mode WASAPI. When use AP analyzer as a source, it truncates the bits to 16 which creates a different (instrumentation) problem. But oddly, those spikes disappear. Can't figure out what is going on there. Anyway, using AP SINAD rose to low 90s (not shown). Anyway, ranking is poor relative to other portable dongles and adapters:
Dynamic range is poor both at full and 50 mv levels:
50 mv noise level is quite high relative to other products tested (101 to date!):
This means if you use sensitive IEMs, you may hear background noise.
Jitter test made no sense whatsoever:
Reconstruction filter is typical slow one:
We care the most about power so let's sweep that starting with 300 ohm load:
As predicted, there is hardly any power there:
It is not much better at 32 ohm either:
Let's hope dynamic power is better than this in listening tests.
Fiio BTR3 Bluetooth Streaming Measurements
Since many people will use this with Bluetooth, let's stream some bits to it using the best codec available, LDAC:
There is no penalty for using BT which is nice. Dynamic range likewise is similar:
Fiio BTR3 Headphone Listening Tests
As usual I start with my Sennheiser HD650 to test ability to drive high impedance headphones. As one would predict from the measurements, there is just no volume here. Bass is anemic as a result and overall sound is bland even at maximum volume. Switching to low impedance Drop Ether CX resulted in similar experience. Disappointing all around and not at all what I expect to hear from an add-on device for portable listening.
FYI above testing was performed using Roon my Samsung player streaming LDAC (same was used for measurements).
Conclusions
I have gotten tons of requests to measure the BTR3 so I take it that it is quite popular. That led me to think that it would perform well and was quite surprised to discover range of performance issues both objectively and subjectively. I like the functionality and such but if you are going to carry something extra, it needs to outperform what comes out of a portable device or a $9 dongle. Sadly we don't have that.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Fiio BTR3.
----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
