This is a review and detailed measurements of the KEiiD KD-W01 streaming DAC and Bluetooth receiver. It was kindly purchased and drop shipped to me by a member. It costs only $69 from Amazon including Prime shipping.
I must say, as super budget products go, the look of this little streamer is not bad:
There is a remote control that I did not use. The M button selects between networking (wired or wireless), Bluetooth or Aux analog input:
The regulator tag is taped on the supplied USB adapter which makes it suspect as far as passing such a test. Fortunately you can use its cord with a more trusted option (from your favorite phone manufacturer).
For testing, the only option I had to talk to it over the network was Airplay. Airplay has a limit of 16 bits which limits SINAD to 96 dB. I was worried about this but as you will say, there was no reason to feel this way.
Streaming DAC Audio Measurements
I streamed a 24-bit, reference 1 kHz tone using Roon player via Airplay to KD-W01:
First hurdle was that I could not get the volume control above 0.9 volt. We like to see nominal 2 volt output from any stand-alone DAC. The bigger issue was the high distortion though limiting SINAD (sum of distortion and noise) to just 75 dB. This firmly situates the KD-W01 in "poor" ranking of all DACs tested:
So I thought I hook up an external DAC such as Schiit Modius to it and see if it improves performance. To my surprise, it didn't do much good:
We could go higher in volume but distortion is quite high as is noise. It seems both of those are baked into the stream seeing how the volume control still works with S/PDIF output.
This is how the Modius performs with any Audio Analyzer S/PDIF feeding it:
An entirely different class of performance there.
Lastly I decided to analyze the performance of S/PDIF by itself:
As you see in orange, the KD-W01 streamer spits out tons of jitter and noise by itself. Such was the case even if I was not playing anything!
Conclusions
The KEiiD KD-W01 is priced well for a streamer with good functionality and decent looks. Alas, for us anal audiophiles, we want performance and design excellence -booth of which are missing from it.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the KD-W01.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
My wife is out until tomorrow so I thought I throw a wild party. Then I realized a) there is a pandemic going on and b) I don't have the money for it. I can't do anything about the former but for the latter, I thought I remedy that by ask you all to donate what you can using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
I must say, as super budget products go, the look of this little streamer is not bad:
There is a remote control that I did not use. The M button selects between networking (wired or wireless), Bluetooth or Aux analog input:
The regulator tag is taped on the supplied USB adapter which makes it suspect as far as passing such a test. Fortunately you can use its cord with a more trusted option (from your favorite phone manufacturer).
For testing, the only option I had to talk to it over the network was Airplay. Airplay has a limit of 16 bits which limits SINAD to 96 dB. I was worried about this but as you will say, there was no reason to feel this way.
Streaming DAC Audio Measurements
I streamed a 24-bit, reference 1 kHz tone using Roon player via Airplay to KD-W01:
First hurdle was that I could not get the volume control above 0.9 volt. We like to see nominal 2 volt output from any stand-alone DAC. The bigger issue was the high distortion though limiting SINAD (sum of distortion and noise) to just 75 dB. This firmly situates the KD-W01 in "poor" ranking of all DACs tested:
So I thought I hook up an external DAC such as Schiit Modius to it and see if it improves performance. To my surprise, it didn't do much good:
We could go higher in volume but distortion is quite high as is noise. It seems both of those are baked into the stream seeing how the volume control still works with S/PDIF output.
This is how the Modius performs with any Audio Analyzer S/PDIF feeding it:
An entirely different class of performance there.
Lastly I decided to analyze the performance of S/PDIF by itself:
As you see in orange, the KD-W01 streamer spits out tons of jitter and noise by itself. Such was the case even if I was not playing anything!
Conclusions
The KEiiD KD-W01 is priced well for a streamer with good functionality and decent looks. Alas, for us anal audiophiles, we want performance and design excellence -booth of which are missing from it.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the KD-W01.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
My wife is out until tomorrow so I thought I throw a wild party. Then I realized a) there is a pandemic going on and b) I don't have the money for it. I can't do anything about the former but for the latter, I thought I remedy that by ask you all to donate what you can using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
