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I don't know if the phone would win or not. My unit has IMD and THD below .002% even if driving 600 ohm loads while putting out a few volts. It has at or a touch below -110db noise floors. Response is dead flat except for a touch (.15 db) off at the very top, and about that much below 10 hz. Reconstruction filters are well enough done aliasing like effects don't show up. It isn't SOTA, it also isn't bad. Doing room correction is a big, big plus well beyond my DAC vs the best I have heard. Now your general basic measures aren't a tell all though they tell quite a bit. One can sometimes learn more with other tests.
Is the LG G5 better than this, I don't know, if it were I would have no problems using it instead. Might wish to move up to something more ergonomic for music playback.
Now what would convince you a DAC is capable of enough fidelity that no further improvement is possible? I do mean fidelity to source not just what sounds good leaning toward someone's preferences.
I can tell you current modest AD and DA gear is not far from total transparency. There isn't a 50% improvement left possible. There isn't likely a 10% improvement possible. I think we are down to a few percent left to get in fidelity at most. How will you know when you achieve it? If we achieve total audible transparency and do so for cheap, then no amount of money can improve upon it. What is left at that point is learning how to process for preferences which don't always correlate with transparency, accuracy or fidelity. There is a big market for peddling preference as performance.
DSD would appear to be able to be a fine high fidelity format. I don't see what its benefits are vs well performing PCM. It has many disadvantages. One is on the recording end. You cannot edit it or process it. With bad processing prevalent that may not be a bad thing always. What happens in some uses is we get analog based processing and mixing as music is done then the mix recorded with DSD. Or people do editing with requires a PCM step in the middle. DSD simply isn't easy to work with, and I don't see the big advantage.
In terms of fidelity you have many different opinions. Some good experienced people on the recording end tell us 192/24 gets the mic feeds fully. Others say we need 384 khz to get it. Yet others have been saying 768 will do it. How is this being decided? Sighted uncontrolled listening? Not good enough for me. We also have quite believable credible people saying there is nothing gained going past 96 khz. Maybe I have lousy hearing, but well done 48 khz doesn't leave lots on the table. There are no revolutions in reproduced sound quality pursuing these ever increasing sample rates or things like DSD. What is being missed simply isn't enough for that to occur. Revolutions in marketing will work I suppose. We already have inexpensive portable playback with 384 khz capability.
So back to the regularly scheduled marketing spin, what makes DSD so good, how do you know that, and do you have anything other than I heard it and it is so?
One can always hope! This whole hobby is about preferences. Unless you are involved in engineering a project, how does one know what the recording sounds like? You may prefer DSD or PCM on YOUR system, depending on how colored it is or how you like your music to sound or whatever. Cheers!
