This is a review and detailed measurements of the Shanling UP4 DAC and Bluetooth Headphone Amplifier. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $105 on Amazon including Prime shipping.
This is a very compact unit even though it has battery built-in:
There are two outputs: standard 3.5mm and "balanced" 2.5mm.
There is a nicely implemented volume control which has very fine graduations unlike the stock ones in the operating system.
A single mode button on top is heavily "overloaded" as far as functionality serving as both gain control and filter settings. I had no luck changing the gain when I used the unit on Windows. Switching them made no difference. Could be operator error although there is a firmware upgrade that deals with this on Android.
Some really nice specs are provided by the company (e.g. SNR of 120 dB or something like it) so let's see how it measures.
Shanling UP4 Measurements
As is common with many dongles, I could not properly use my ASIO interface to talk to UP4 so I am limited to just static test files. Fortunately we can run the dashboard:
Ouch. This is disappointing. Distortion is quite high causing SINAD to sink so low. Switching to balanced output improves things a hair:
In this day and age, this is a failing grade:
Balanced output at 1.7 volt is not high enough in my book (like to see minimum of 2 volts) to power high-impedance headphones. Fortunately balanced output remedies this as we will see later.
Dynamic range is also quite poor:
Not sure where the 120 dB comes from. Sometimes these devices distort more when charging. I had a heck of a time decoding the many colors and blinking the one LED does but I thought it was indicating that it was happy and charged.
Jitter is very clean but then again the high noise floor covers many sins:
I struggled through changing the filter once or twice and got this:
So the typical sharp filter is there which is what I used for the rest of the tests.
Most important bit here is power delivery. So let's start with 300 ohm load:
As expected, unbalanced is not impressive but balanced is quite good:
Situation is better at 32 ohm:
Shanling UP4 Listening Tests
I started listening with Sennheiser HD-650 using unbalanced mode. There just wasn't enough power there to get excited. So I quickly switched to balanced and now we were in business! The volume control was a joy to use compared to the terrible software controlled ones, or coarse controls on many dongles. The nice experience continued with Drop Ether CX. Plenty of volume, detail and dynamic range. Was it a bit distorted? Hard to say without a proper AB test.
Conclusions
As a stand-alone DAC, the performance of UP4 as tested is terrible. I say as tested since I could not change the gain. But I doubt that it would make that much of a difference. What rescues the UP4 is its balanced output and nice volume control. In addition, it has bluetooth which many such dongles don't have.
Because of the above factors, and despite the terrible DAC measurements, I am going to put the Shanling UP4 on my recommended list.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
This is a very compact unit even though it has battery built-in:
There are two outputs: standard 3.5mm and "balanced" 2.5mm.
There is a nicely implemented volume control which has very fine graduations unlike the stock ones in the operating system.
A single mode button on top is heavily "overloaded" as far as functionality serving as both gain control and filter settings. I had no luck changing the gain when I used the unit on Windows. Switching them made no difference. Could be operator error although there is a firmware upgrade that deals with this on Android.
Some really nice specs are provided by the company (e.g. SNR of 120 dB or something like it) so let's see how it measures.
Shanling UP4 Measurements
As is common with many dongles, I could not properly use my ASIO interface to talk to UP4 so I am limited to just static test files. Fortunately we can run the dashboard:
Ouch. This is disappointing. Distortion is quite high causing SINAD to sink so low. Switching to balanced output improves things a hair:
In this day and age, this is a failing grade:
Balanced output at 1.7 volt is not high enough in my book (like to see minimum of 2 volts) to power high-impedance headphones. Fortunately balanced output remedies this as we will see later.
Dynamic range is also quite poor:
Not sure where the 120 dB comes from. Sometimes these devices distort more when charging. I had a heck of a time decoding the many colors and blinking the one LED does but I thought it was indicating that it was happy and charged.
Jitter is very clean but then again the high noise floor covers many sins:
I struggled through changing the filter once or twice and got this:
So the typical sharp filter is there which is what I used for the rest of the tests.
Most important bit here is power delivery. So let's start with 300 ohm load:
As expected, unbalanced is not impressive but balanced is quite good:
Situation is better at 32 ohm:
Shanling UP4 Listening Tests
I started listening with Sennheiser HD-650 using unbalanced mode. There just wasn't enough power there to get excited. So I quickly switched to balanced and now we were in business! The volume control was a joy to use compared to the terrible software controlled ones, or coarse controls on many dongles. The nice experience continued with Drop Ether CX. Plenty of volume, detail and dynamic range. Was it a bit distorted? Hard to say without a proper AB test.
Conclusions
As a stand-alone DAC, the performance of UP4 as tested is terrible. I say as tested since I could not change the gain. But I doubt that it would make that much of a difference. What rescues the UP4 is its balanced output and nice volume control. In addition, it has bluetooth which many such dongles don't have.
Because of the above factors, and despite the terrible DAC measurements, I am going to put the Shanling UP4 on my recommended list.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Last edited:
(hereafter to be known as 'BP')
