This is a review and detailed measurements of the Sparrow Portable MQA DAC and balanced headphone amplifier. It was sent to me by the company and costs US $199.
The Sparrow comes in a tidy package with a couple of USB cables:
There is a USB-C connector at one end and dual outputs: unbalanced 3.5 mm and balanced 2.5mm. Sadly there are no volume controls on the unit so you must use your source volume control.
Testing of the Sparrow was more difficult as usual because it somehow exposes itself as 48 kHz/16 bits forcing resampling of test signals. I worked around this but it limited the number of tests I could run. Note that this is an issue with my test setup and won't impact your use of the unit. Indeed I used Roon player to perform some of the measurements.
Earmen Sparrow Measurements
Here is our usual dashboard:
Nice to see our nominal 2 volt output, matching what we get out of desktop DACs. Not so good is very elevated (by desktop standards) distortion. The ranking across all DACs therefore is rather poor:
Jitter test however showed cleaner results than many such dongles:
Most important test for a portable headphone amp though is power so let's see that for 300 ohm load:
These are very good numbers for a portable product:
As you see, in balanced mode it way up there.
Here are the results for 33 ohm:
So once again competitive even without using its balanced output:
Earmen Sparrow Headphone Listening Test
I started my listening tests using the inefficient 25 ohm, Ether CX headphone via a balanced cable. I was very impressed with volume level and impact of bass frequencies indicating sufficient power. Sure, the last 20% of the volume could make slight static but stay below that and performance was very good.
I then switched to Sennheiser HD-650 using unbalanced mode, here the output level was just sufficient. I would use balanced cables with high impedance headphones for good results.
Conclusions
The distortion rating of Earmen Sparrow is high. Based on that I was going to give it poor scores but the powerful output stage, especially in balanced mode, rescues it and pushes it to above average subjective performance. There are other choices out there with slightly less power but much lower distortion so you decide which is best for you.
I am going to put the Earmen Sparrow on my recommended list on strength of its output power.
------------
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 Sparrow comes in a tidy package with a couple of USB cables:
There is a USB-C connector at one end and dual outputs: unbalanced 3.5 mm and balanced 2.5mm. Sadly there are no volume controls on the unit so you must use your source volume control.
Testing of the Sparrow was more difficult as usual because it somehow exposes itself as 48 kHz/16 bits forcing resampling of test signals. I worked around this but it limited the number of tests I could run. Note that this is an issue with my test setup and won't impact your use of the unit. Indeed I used Roon player to perform some of the measurements.
Earmen Sparrow Measurements
Here is our usual dashboard:
Nice to see our nominal 2 volt output, matching what we get out of desktop DACs. Not so good is very elevated (by desktop standards) distortion. The ranking across all DACs therefore is rather poor:
Jitter test however showed cleaner results than many such dongles:
Most important test for a portable headphone amp though is power so let's see that for 300 ohm load:
These are very good numbers for a portable product:
As you see, in balanced mode it way up there.
Here are the results for 33 ohm:
So once again competitive even without using its balanced output:
Earmen Sparrow Headphone Listening Test
I started my listening tests using the inefficient 25 ohm, Ether CX headphone via a balanced cable. I was very impressed with volume level and impact of bass frequencies indicating sufficient power. Sure, the last 20% of the volume could make slight static but stay below that and performance was very good.
I then switched to Sennheiser HD-650 using unbalanced mode, here the output level was just sufficient. I would use balanced cables with high impedance headphones for good results.
Conclusions
The distortion rating of Earmen Sparrow is high. Based on that I was going to give it poor scores but the powerful output stage, especially in balanced mode, rescues it and pushes it to above average subjective performance. There are other choices out there with slightly less power but much lower distortion so you decide which is best for you.
I am going to put the Earmen Sparrow on my recommended list on strength of its output power.
------------
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/
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