@amirm I have to commend you sir for a balanced review! It's unfortunate that the Littledot gear misses its distortion spec.
(From amazon)
THD+N: 0.15% (80 mW @300 ohm)
Power Output:
350 mW @ 300/600 ohm
300 mW @ 120 ohm
100 mW @ 32 ohm
It's THD stays above 0.1% for most of its operation which is a good bit more than 0.15% quoted. Also though it has a healthy power output at 350 mw, man, it's not close to the 350 mw quoted in your tests. This is a real problem. It sounds to me like blatant lying by the manufacturer . And I'm seeing this all the time even in gear that measures very well. Inflated power specs! It's not right and I appreciate you doing it because it shows the world that there's falsehoods being advertised.
Regarding performance:
The Little dot spurious tones do intrude into potentially audible territory coming in at -55db.
But I appreciate the listening tests you did. You discovered that the audible impact was barely noticeable. Quite surprising to me honestly as I thought that would be significantly noticeable in music listening. This sort of combination of measurements and listening tests help people like me understand what kind of impacts measurements put out in real world music listening.
The Little dot measures rather poorly imo
with distortion spikes at -55 db
vs the JDS atom
with distortion spikes at -118 db (!!) - 63 db lower distortion!
Even at these high distortion values the audible impact in music listening appears to be seemingly very low.
I hope you continue to perform as many listening tests as you have time for so we can get a better idea of how measurements correlate to music listening.
To be honest, I am hesitant though, for me those distortion spikes and snr are simply too bad. I would probably bias myself in to disliking it if I ever purchased it simply because I know its real measurements.
Having said that, I once had my heart set on buying the Little Dot mk8. Whatta looker!
