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Experiences with new DAC and wireless streaming

barbosas

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Sep 29, 2020
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Hi All,

I'm a long time lurker, decided to register because i finally took the plunge and bought a DAC and would like to share my experience and ask for some feedback.

So, I was streaming via wireless to a power amplifier via a Chromecast Audio, but I was feeling that the analog output was not very detailed and decided to buy a Topping DX3 Pro, mainly because it also has the possibility to use headphones.

My first impressions are very positive, sound quality is definitely much better then using only the chromecast, still testing for reliability but so far so good, and on the plus side, the unit came with 15V/1A transformer included in the box (bought on Amazon UK)

I use mainly Youtube Music and while testing the cast functions with YTM as the source, I noticed that the sample rate displayed on the DAC changes, between 44.1 and 48 depending on the track being played, so I assume YTM has musics with different sample rates.

I decided to test the cast to chromecast function with uBubblePnp and no surprises, the sample rate is displayed correctly depending on the track up to 96Khz.

I then decided to do some testing with Bluetooth, and with Bluetooth no matter the app I'm using on my mobile, the DAC always shows 96Khz, does this means the BT connection is upsampling everything that goes out? or is it just not displaying the sample rate properly?

Sound quality is apparently no different between chromecast and BT, but with BT it happened a couple of times to hear some artifacts on the sound, the phone is no more then 2meters away of the dac, connection stability I believe is not the best.

Thanks,
 
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barbosas

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Sep 29, 2020
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Mistery solved, at least on my huawei P30 I had an option enabled on the BT settings named "High Sound Quality" that was causing everything to be transmitted in 96khz.
 

jcadduono

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Dec 10, 2019
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Yeah so the high SQ option makes it use LDAC for transmission. While the 96K upsampling (part of LDAC encoding default HQ profile) is fine and should not negatively affect SQ by itself, the very short range of LDAC's high quality transmission bitrate will occasionally be a problem that lowers SQ.
You can probably go into the Developer Options of your phone and change LDAC to use 44/48K sample rate and it will be able to maintain higher quality with further range. LDAC has always been a little finnicky for me so I tend to stick with aptX.
 
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