This is a review and detailed measurements of the SMSL DP5 music streaming player and DAC. It was kindly sent to me by
shenzhenaudio. The DP5 costs US $599.99.
The DP5 sports a very nice, high resolution display:
View attachment 88228
Alas, I am not a fan of the rotary control. It has sharp edges and generally feels very cheap. And oh, lest you are tempted to touch the screen to select items, don't as it is not touch sensitive.
The icons are the "VCR controls" are too tiny, especially the menu one.
See if you can find the volume level on that display! It is top left in the tiniest font you can imagine. Even when that menu is not up, it is the same size. It is enlarged nicely when adjusting but then you get a bland picture showing the connection, not the existing volume. I routinely check the volume before hitting play to make sure I am not going to blow my ears off. I can't do that with such a tiny display.
By far the worst part of the interface is that there is no way to select an input! Yes, you read that right. I read the manual 10 times, played with all the menus repeatedly and still can't figure out how you select any input. Hooking up USB cable selected that fortunately so I tested that as you see below. But I could not figure out how to select any other input.
OK, the above is not the worst thing. The worst thing is reliability of the firmware. Airplay was off by default (why? this is a streamer). I turned it on and my Roon player nicely detected it. As soon as I tried to play anything to it, it disappeared from Roon menu and would not come back. Power cycling the DP5 caused it to come back, only to disappear the same. Given this, I could not test any streaming performance.
Even if Airplay did work, it would limit performance to 16 bits which is well below the capabilities of the DAC in this unit. SMSL needs to support Roon. I can get Roon support in a $20 Raspberry Pi. I should be able to get it just as well in this much more expensive device.
There was a System Update option which I selected, only to be told the firmware file is missing. I know desktop products rarely do this but it is time to support network update of the firmware. What was there was version 1.1 by the way.
The back panel shows the myriads of inputs and outputs:
View attachment 88232
Nice to see balanced out which I used exclusively for my testing.
DAC Audio Measurements
By default, the USB interface activates in mass storage mode and you need to go into setup to convert it to USB. Once done, this is our dashboard:
View attachment 88233
It is nice that the output reaches up to 5.6 volts but performance drops as you go above 4 volts or so:
View attachment 88234
Still, good to have the option of higher output.
SINAD at 112 dB is in competent category:
View attachment 88235
I was surprised to see IMD vs level start so good but then degrade toward the end:
View attachment 88236
Is that our ESS IMD Hump but moved to higher level?
Linearity is excellent:
View attachment 88237
I did not see any options to change the DAC filter but the standard one is better than many other choices:
View attachment 88238
Would have been nice to have one that is super sharp and truncates at 22.05 kHz, rather than 24 but this is typical of DAC chip default filters.
Dynamic range was superb:
View attachment 88239
I was surprised to see so much excessive noise and spurious tones in our jitter test:
View attachment 88240
These are not audible artifacts (levels are below -110 dB) but from engineering point of view, is a good step backward from even cheap $100 DACs these days. Likely the Linux subsystem running the networking/streaming software is impacting the DAC performance.
Multitone performance is excellent although the above issue may have degraded it some:
View attachment 88241
Conclusions
The DAC performance of the DP5 is very good to excellent. Alas, I was going to test a streaming device and I could not. Unless I am going blind, lack of simple options like changing inputs shows the product has not been properly tested. When and if that happens, I will test the DP5 again. Until then, I cannot recommend it.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Check out this perfect specimen of a Bosc Pear, peeled and ready to be sliced and dunked in chocolate fondue:
View attachment 88242
As they say in the south,
that was good eating!
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