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Kindle Fire Bluetooth

Yorkshire Mouth

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Okay, I’m really unsure where to put this thread, but this will have to do.

Amir has previously reviewed the audio out in an older Kindle Fire, and it…ahem “left room for improvement”.

I have new Kindle Fire HD10, which can output Bluetooth to my Bluetooth headphones or Topping DAC/headphone amp.

So my questions are, what will actually happen, and what will the quality be like?

Specifically, I presume bluetoothing the audio would effectively bypass everything in the tablet which isn’t up to snuff (the internal DAC, the internal headphone amp), and the quality will be dependent on external DAC and amp on the Bluetooth receiving end.

Is that right? Have I missed anything? Is there something inside the tablet which can still fowl things up, and is it likely to?

Cheers.
 

staticV3

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Is that right? Have I missed anything? Is there something inside the tablet which can still fowl things up, and is it likely to?
The bluetooth codec. Amir has measured some of them here.
Note that they usually do worse with real music or multitones than with single sines.
Though perceptual encoding is a very complex topic that simple FFT measurements don't really do justice to.

Here's a good resource about BT codecs: https://habr.com/en/post/456182/
 

staticV3

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I remember reading this and how it says...

> LDAC is a marketing fluff.

Which seems not to be the case. LDAC works as an audio codec, afaict.
The reasoning behind that is LDAC's advertisement of Hi-Res 96kHz support, which is just plain stupid in an environment as bitrate limited as BT audio.
You end up wasting bit rate encoding data that's imperceptible to human ears anyway and making the audio that we can hear worse in the process.

That doesn't mean that LDAC is bad or anything. You can still set it to 44.1/48kHz and get the full advantage of 990Kbps.
It's just that Sony caters to uneducated audiophiles that make them the most money.
 

Mal

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I have a Kindle Fire Stick and tried bluetoothing to my KEF LSXs and it sounded bad. I used a HDMI -> Optical converter to get purer, wired digital into my KEFs and it sounded great! So bluetooth might be a problem for you... if so, wire up!
 
OP
Yorkshire Mouth

Yorkshire Mouth

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Just to be clear, I’m aware of the limitations of Bluetooth as a whole - that’s not my question. For the record, the specs for the Kindle tablet say “Built-in Bluetooth 5.0 LE with support for A2DP compatible stereo headphones, speakers, microphone and LE accessories.”

I believe that’s the same as my iPhone, which is where I’m wanting a comparison.

My question is, will the Bluetooth from the tablet - all else being equal - be of the same standard as Amazon Music Bluetoothed from any other device (let’s presume the same Bluetooth standard), specifically an iPhone 11? Is the tablet likely to have ‘done’ something to the digital signal in-between it having arrived at the tablet, being received from Amazon’s servers, and being sent to the Bluetooth receiver, it leaving the tablet being transmitted to the Bluetooth headphones or Topping DAVC/amp? Will (should?) the Kindle give a different result to the iPhone?

Cheers.
 
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