Review: Apple vs Google USB-C Headphone Adapters

[amanieux]

Two points on that video from me, just to clarify my position:
1. The notion of minimal difference - to me, minimal difference may be important. E.g., two sources sound almost the same, but one has better attack and decay/transients. Small change? yes, in the grand scheme of things - these may only be 1% of the overall wave graph shape. But, I do love them in my music. In their test, Fiio won over the non-Apple dongle, regardless of the margins.
2. DAC+amp test has more intangibles than just the DAC test, as there are 2 variables instead of 1. Additional problem of the video was volume matching to the weakest amp (dongle), as was picked upon by their tester number 4. IEMs are less affected by the amp, but still are affected. They really should have plugged all three sources into the same amp.

I am thinking of running my test in the following way. N trials, each trial consisting of the same song section played twice. The experimenter chooses if it is played from different sources (e.g., dongle then Mojo) or on the same source (eg., dongle twice). Volume is set to zero in the beginning of each song, the participant is free to adjust it. The participant ranks the first song as 10, second song as 11, 10 or 9 =better, same, worse. The experimenter adds up all the scores for both sources, divides by the number of trials and we have a result.

i don't think they volume matched to 100% of the weakest dongle amp, but they matched all 3 to normal listening level which must have been quite high because of the openback in a noisy cafe, if you are ready to pay $200 for a faster attack this choice is ok, i'd rather invest these $200 in upgrading my iem because i will hear much more improved sound allocating my budget this way. anyway your idea to let tester adjust the volume is interesting, will it be a blind test ?

 

[Panasonyum]

your idea to let tester adjust the volume is interesting, will it be a blind test ?

Yep

 

[markanini]

I'd love to see a proper double-blind test with the Apple adapter and many other highly-rated DACs. I'm betting that hardly anyone will hear a difference.

Needs confirmation, but there likely are specific samples that could be easily ABX-able on the Apple dongle. https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/63038 That said some other $10 dongles don't have the same signal specific distortion so don't take it as a case for spending a premium, products costing ten times more than Apple dongle have the same issue: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...vices-a-comparative-review.63038/post-2414964

 

[AudioSceptic]

Needs confirmation, but there likely are specific samples that could be easily ABX-able on the Apple dongle. https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/63038 That said some other $10 dongles don't have the same signal specific distortion so don't take it as a case for spending a premium, products costing ten times more than Apple dongle have the same issue: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...vices-a-comparative-review.63038/post-2414964

Thanks, that's some article! Do we know that, although the MacBook Air's HP output suffers from the "Cirrus hump", the Apple adapter also does?

 

[AudioSceptic]

Needs confirmation, but there likely are specific samples that could be easily ABX-able on the Apple dongle. https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/63038 That said some other $10 dongles don't have the same signal specific distortion so don't take it as a case for spending a premium, products costing ten times more than Apple dongle have the same issue: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...vices-a-comparative-review.63038/post-2414964

Strangely enough, one of the 3 "Golden Ears" in Archimago's test used

Macbook Pro M3 (audio at 96kHz) → TRUTHEAR x Crinacle Zero IEM

 

[Panasonyum]

I am thinking of running my test in the following way. N trials, each trial consisting of the same song section played twice. The experimenter chooses if it is played from different sources (e.g., dongle then Mojo) or on the same source (eg., dongle twice). Volume is set to zero in the beginning of each song, the participant is free to adjust it. The participant ranks the first song as 10, second song as 11, 10 or 9 =better, same, worse. The experimenter adds up all the scores for both sources, divides by the number of trials and we have a result.

This is a nice experiment, but, to be fair, with a sizable flaw, I quote :

In other words, hearing a perfect recording of a $20K DAC on your personal $10 ($100, $1000, etc) DAC is not the same as actually listening to a $20K DAC. I initially thought that the participants were actually listening to the devices, but online survey with a set of recordings is not really convincing me. E.g., if I listened to a great recording of a $500 speaker on my $10 speaker, would I prefer it to a great recording of a $10 speaker? (Let's say we ran equalization them to make better fit to the DAC analogy.) The answer is not obvious...

Basically, I now think that the two links to blind tests above don't quite scratch my scientific itch The video with the headphones+DAC+amp blind test was done on a noisy street, the addition of amplification muddied the results, their volume matching to the weak Apple dongle amp put other DACs to a disadvantage. And the Archimago test was a blind test of DAC recordings .

I'll see if I can organize my partner to suffer though half an hour of cable switching to test my preference for Chord Mojo over the Apple dongle to finetune my current conclusion that the difference is very small or none. I'll be using my active Adam A5X, in a quiet room. Of course, in my test n will be equal to 1 participant, but at least the the other three shortcomings will be mitigated - actual device listening, no amp in the equation, no street noise. I used to be grade 8 on piano too, so my ears -while certainly not golden- shouldn't be made of lead

Here is my humble attempt at a blind test of the Apple USB-C DAC vs Chord Mojo DAC (bypassing their amps!) https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...sting-dacs-starting-with-apple-vs-mojo.66553/. TLDR, it was a statistically easy, but auditorily hard win for the Mojo.