I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my Sony NWZX300 – a beautiful (yet flawed) little beast. Great interface, stunning build quality, snappy performance... but significantly underpowered. Also, there's no "Enqueue" or "Add to playback queue" function, which is a real shame! And beware that buying one means inadvertently paying a licensing fee to MQA. Sigh.
I thought it would be a good first candidate to test with the Clarett 2Pre, having finally set it up as a decent amateur audio measurement device. (You can see my measurements of the Clarett itself here.)
Test setup:
I started by playing a test signal to match the channel inputs, and then output the RMAA test file at 24-bit, 96kHz:
Great overall results, but the performance doesn't really match up to the price tag - particularly with measurement-aware companies like Fiio knocking at the door. And the lack of raw power means it only really shines when driving IEMs, making the balanced output (which may have been a tempting proposition to drive full sized cans) somewhat redundant.
Nevertheless, they'll have to claw it out of my cold, dead hands. Love this thing.
I thought it would be a good first candidate to test with the Clarett 2Pre, having finally set it up as a decent amateur audio measurement device. (You can see my measurements of the Clarett itself here.)
Test setup:
- NWZX300 configured in low gain, maximum volume
- Balanced output via 4.4mm Pentaconn to 2 x 3-pin XLRs
- XLRs to input 1 and 2 of Clarett 2Pre
I started by playing a test signal to match the channel inputs, and then output the RMAA test file at 24-bit, 96kHz:
Great overall results, but the performance doesn't really match up to the price tag - particularly with measurement-aware companies like Fiio knocking at the door. And the lack of raw power means it only really shines when driving IEMs, making the balanced output (which may have been a tempting proposition to drive full sized cans) somewhat redundant.
Nevertheless, they'll have to claw it out of my cold, dead hands. Love this thing.