This is a review and detailed measurements of the Andover Audio Songbird hifi streamer and switcher. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $149.
The Songbird is quite small and is powered by micro-USB jack which strangely is in front, not the back:
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The one button in the front controls the input. As you push it, it changes color with no indication on the box or the manual as to what they mean. Fortunately there is an App and it shows the selected input. The back shows rather rich functionality:
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You have both digital input and outputs! There is also wifi and Bluetooth. I focused on wired Ethernet so didn't have to mess with configuring those.
I used the hub in my monitor to power the unit as I do with USB DACs and it all worked well. The app instantly found the device which was a relief. It was impressed that the app was rich in functionality and indexed my library with reasonable speed.
Andover Songbird Measurements
I fired up my Roon player and using Airplay streamed my test tone to the Songbird and measured the performance of Aux Out:
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Well, this is very disappointing. The company advertises this as a high-resolution device yet we are far, far short of 16 bit performance with SINAD of 77 dB. Spectrum shown is quite noisy indicating a very low quality DAC implementation.
Airplay truncates to 16 bits so let's test digital output to see if we get full performance there:
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This is much better but we are still short of 16 bit performance.
I then fed the same Toslink output to
Gustard X26Pro that I had on my bench to see what its performance would be. This time I am using the company App to play the source file:
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We see peaks at multiples of 100 Hz which usually indicates improper conversion of 24 bit test signal I am using to 16 bit. Where that is happening, I can't tell you.
Finally, I wanted to see how well it handles analog input and whether it is digitized and it is:
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So again disappointing performance. Shame.
I also tried to test Toslink in but it simply would not work. I used the same cable as Toslink out so can't be the cabling. Maybe a defect in the unit I have.
Conclusions
The functionality behind the Songbird id quite nice. You get an input selector, DAC, digital in and out and streaming. And at a great price with good packaging. But where is the performance? Maybe they are using some smart speaker IC used for mass market devices with who cares about performance specification. Or maybe it is a good IC but poorly implemented. Either way, this could have been a killer device. Even if its internal DAC didn't perform well, we could use an external DAC with it but that path is neutered somehow as well. There is nothing top hang my had on performance wise.
On strictly performance basis, I can't recommend the Andover Songbird.
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