This is a Review and Measurements of budget SMAKN X5 DAC and Headphone Amplifier. It is on kind loan from a forum member. It retails for just $25 on Amazon including prime shipping in US!
It is a cute little box with sturdy build:
It worked plug-and-play in Windows 10 Creators Edition so no driver install was necessary. I tested it using ASIO4ALL wrapper to create an ASIO driver for my Audio Precision APx555 analyzer in bit-exact mode.
Let's see how it measures.
Measurements
As you know, I always start with my Dashboard view and this is sort of what it looked like:
I say sort of because while the scope, output voltage and frequency were stable, the distortion figures were jumping all over, varying by as much as 20 dB! You can't see that in the static display so I put the analyzer in real-time mode and asked it to show the THD+N distortion figure as time marched on:
Oh man.... As you see, we have sudden and huge jumps in distortion. This is me doing absolutely nothing to do the unit. Just playing that 1 kHz tone. Lots of noise seemed to be bleeding into the output of the DAC. Never seen anything like this.
I then made an attempt to plug THD+N versus output power but due to the high variations, the analyzer would give up. So I hacked that up to average the readings and this is what I got:
Hopeless!
Measurements stopped! "No soup for you!"
Subjective Listening
I hooked up my Grado SR60e to it for grins and pulled up some of my electronic tracks I use for headphone testing. At any decent output level bass impulses would get week and distorted. Clearly there is inadequate power supply capacitance and overall juice to drive much here. Likely explaining the distortion spikes.
Listening to the headphone output of my HP laptop was more pleasing, but not nearly loud enough.
It does produce music though.
Conclusions
I seem to be on a bad streak now. Or bad mood. Or both. But this is a definite DO NOT BUY. Yes it is cheap. Yes it is a nice little box. Yes I like the volume control on it. But the guts are just not there.
As always, questions, comments, corrections, etc. are welcome.
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If you like this review, please consider donating funds for these types of hardware purchases using Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/audiosciencereview), or upgrading your membership here though Paypal (https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-and-measurements.2164/page-3#post-59054).
It is a cute little box with sturdy build:
Let's see how it measures.
Measurements
As you know, I always start with my Dashboard view and this is sort of what it looked like:
I say sort of because while the scope, output voltage and frequency were stable, the distortion figures were jumping all over, varying by as much as 20 dB! You can't see that in the static display so I put the analyzer in real-time mode and asked it to show the THD+N distortion figure as time marched on:
Oh man.... As you see, we have sudden and huge jumps in distortion. This is me doing absolutely nothing to do the unit. Just playing that 1 kHz tone. Lots of noise seemed to be bleeding into the output of the DAC. Never seen anything like this.
I then made an attempt to plug THD+N versus output power but due to the high variations, the analyzer would give up. So I hacked that up to average the readings and this is what I got:
Hopeless!
Measurements stopped! "No soup for you!"
Subjective Listening
I hooked up my Grado SR60e to it for grins and pulled up some of my electronic tracks I use for headphone testing. At any decent output level bass impulses would get week and distorted. Clearly there is inadequate power supply capacitance and overall juice to drive much here. Likely explaining the distortion spikes.
Listening to the headphone output of my HP laptop was more pleasing, but not nearly loud enough.
It does produce music though.
Conclusions
I seem to be on a bad streak now. Or bad mood. Or both. But this is a definite DO NOT BUY. Yes it is cheap. Yes it is a nice little box. Yes I like the volume control on it. But the guts are just not there.
As always, questions, comments, corrections, etc. are welcome.
-----
If you like this review, please consider donating funds for these types of hardware purchases using Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/audiosciencereview), or upgrading your membership here though Paypal (https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-and-measurements.2164/page-3#post-59054).
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