Review and Measurements of Musiland MU1 Headphone Adapter

[sajunky]

There is a replacement for MU1:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...of-musiland-mu2-plus-dac-amp.6964/post-198489

 

[julian_hughes]

Today I received a Musiland MU1 purchased on aliexpress a couple of weeks ago. I'm using it with USB Audio Player Pro on Android 9 on a Sony XZ1 smartphone. The Sony has decent audio except it is a little underpowered and its high output impedance makes my Massdrop Plus balanced armature IEMs sound terrible. The Musiland dongle solves this entirely, and with the bonus that it can also drive my HiFiMan HE4xx planar magnetics to a reasonable level. So far I've tried the Musiland with the Plus, the HE4xx, Sennheiser Momentum circumaural 1st gen, Koss Porta Pro, Samsung/AKG headset, Massdrop Nuforce EDC3. It's great! It sounds fine, impressive even. OK there is no headroom to speak of when driving the HE4xx but it does drive them nicely to modest levels. My other dongle is a Porsche....errr I mean an LG HiFi Plus. The Musiland uses about half the power on standby and also considerably less in use with IEMs and easily driven portable headphones. This really matters when you want or need your smartphone to run all day! For comparison I also have the cheap Samsung dongle you can find reviewed by Amir. Its power consumption is similarly low but it simply cannot adequately drive the HE4xx, it suffers from 4G/LTE interference when the phone pings cell towers, and it doesn't support 88.2 kHz sample rate audio (it turns out that this matters if you use Qobuz as well as if you have your own audio files derived from SACD).

I think the Musiland MU1 is really a good solution for smartphone users. I noticed that there are three newer models, the MU2, MU2 Plus and now the MU3. The MU2 models consume twice as much power as the MU1 though they do additionally support DSD. The MU3 is advertised as only consuming 50 mAh on standby, just like the MU1, and it supports DSD, so it might be my first choice but I can't find it for sale anywhere at the moment. It's very, very new so I guess it's for China based shoppers only for the moment.

The Musiland never gets hot. My LG HiFi Plus gets *very* hot and occasionally gets super hot and cuts out until it cools! I definitely prefer the Musiland. Also the type C connection is snug and secure, the device is as discreet as a tiny extension cord, and there is no need of messing about with attaching it to the phone's case. In effect it becomes part of your IEM/headphone cable.

I can't speak to the longevity of this product but assuming it lasts then it's an unusually good product.

 

[manueljenkin]

There is a note in the advertising of the MU1 that has high current ability for short durations. This must be at play behind these subjectively good results.

Please prove it with squiggles and charts at those transient power scenarios (including SNR). Else I'll consider you too to have fallen prey to audiophoolery.


Also to note the hypocrisy at play. You never considered the topology differences in the Apogee groove and directly concluded it will affect fr just because 20ohm oi. In reality people have tried sub 14 ohm iems (myself included) often with wild impedance swings and my urbanite xl also with noticeable impedance swings showed no signs of having any effect on fr. The two port network model is just different. The only place it truly had issues was with certain crossover based multi ba setups, and it was explicitly stated by Apogee that this is not a supported load. There was not a single attempt to truly verify if the fr was affected or not for non crossover setups with low but swinging impedance.