Glitch
Member
I'm in the market for a DAC+HeadphoneAmp dongle since I primarily use my Android phone as a source. My current desktop brick DAC+Amp is fine but the hedonist in me wants to be able to bring it in bed without getting caught in wires like a fish.
My question is do these dongles output bitperfect signal without an analog pot volume control? I see some of them have a +- digital volume controls and I assume this is perhaps doing voltage regulation on the DAC chip which is fine. But the 2 dongles I'm most interested in - Hidizs S9 Pro and Qudelix 5K are attenuated by the phone volume controls and that makes me nervous. Currently I use the Hiby music player on Android which allows to output in Exclusive Mode (bitperfect) to a USB DAC but this mode disables the Android OS Volume Control and one has to attenuate with the knob on the DAC side. Now these buttonless dongles seem to have proprietary drivers so it's not unreasonable to assume that the driver can send the phone volume inputs to the DAC chip in Exclusive Mode but I just never operated one so I want to understand what it's doing.
I can definitely hear a difference between bitperfect Exclusive Mode and regular OS playback on Android. But I'd be happy to be proven a fool if somebody can show objectively that it's the same.
My question is do these dongles output bitperfect signal without an analog pot volume control? I see some of them have a +- digital volume controls and I assume this is perhaps doing voltage regulation on the DAC chip which is fine. But the 2 dongles I'm most interested in - Hidizs S9 Pro and Qudelix 5K are attenuated by the phone volume controls and that makes me nervous. Currently I use the Hiby music player on Android which allows to output in Exclusive Mode (bitperfect) to a USB DAC but this mode disables the Android OS Volume Control and one has to attenuate with the knob on the DAC side. Now these buttonless dongles seem to have proprietary drivers so it's not unreasonable to assume that the driver can send the phone volume inputs to the DAC chip in Exclusive Mode but I just never operated one so I want to understand what it's doing.
I can definitely hear a difference between bitperfect Exclusive Mode and regular OS playback on Android. But I'd be happy to be proven a fool if somebody can show objectively that it's the same.