I'm not sure what they meant by that either, unless it involved fine tuning the circuit to make it more accurate and/or choosing a particular filter.

Exactly. A DAC is either transparent (i.e. accurately reproduces the original signal) or it's faulty!

Did you measure the voltages?

I'm not sure about that. Most dongles and DAPs are not that good. I reckon the Quad DAC LG phones beat most of them. The ROG 5 might also (I haven't seen any measurements yet). Besides, this thread has "best smartphone" in the title, not "best dongle."

Some people (I include myself here) prefer not having to carry around a dongle plus cable. The Asus ROG 5 looks to be pretty good all round (unless one demands the best camera - and let's face it, most of us just take snaps for personal use/fun).

E1DA 9038 is better than those (better than most, in fact). Good value too.

My HD600s sounded great with my V30+. In fact, high impedance headphones seem to work better (See https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-and-audio-measurement-of-lg-g7-thinq-smartphone.4468/) . I agree that it would sound better with external amplification though.

Would it drive Sennheiser HD600s? What's the output voltage? I've never seen measurements of that phone, which puts me off somewhat. That and the fact that it doesn't have a dedicated DAC (if I'm not mistaken).

I don't really want to carry additional equipment if I can possibly avoid it. I have a Cambridge Audio DACMAGIC XS which is pretty good (and which I now have to use with my V30+ as the ESS DAC has stopped working), but it's annoying to carry in my pocket along with a phone. LG DACs are also...

Hmm. I'd be surprised if LG support it at all - even if I buy a new one. They'll probably tell me that it was never sold here, so they can't repair/replace it. It's a good point, but if the Asus has a UK release, that would be a point in its favour.

It looks like my next phone will be either the Asus ROG 5 (although I'd be happier if somebody measured its audio performance) or an LG V60 (the safer bet, but not easy or cheap to get in the UK).

Interesting. Are you able to say any more about these NX amps? I had assumed that the Asus phones would just use ESS amplification.

I'd never heard of the Black Shark or Nubia phones before. I can't find any mention of a specific DAC though.

Not even that long. Asus have a launch event on May 12th.

Put it in a Spigen or Otterbox case and it'll be fine. It's certainly not a deal-breaker for me - I don't bend my phones.

It's a few years since I tried tagging software and it didn't seem to work then, but I shall try out TagScanner thank you. I have installed the UPnP server plugin for Foobar2000 and it works nicely. Also, I can shuffle using Foobar Remote and send the stream to UAPP. Happy days! For anyone else...

I have about 100000 tracks! Can tagging be automated? I'll have a look at AssetUPnP. I have Foobar2000 on my laptop - I didn't know it could act as a server.

I can't get the Windows 10 DLNA server to work for some reason. Universal Media Server works, but I have to choose each track - I can't shuffle the whole drive (which is really what I want to do). It's better than nothing though.

I'm sure I tried that a few years ago and it worked up to a point (it only seemed to 'see' a limited number of files). I couldn't get it to work recently though, for some reason. I'll have a go at that, thanks.

Thank you, superuser1

Before I tear out any more of my hair, can anyone give me (or point to) a step-by-step guide to streaming music over a LAN from an external drive on a Windows 10 laptop (MS Surface Pro 3) to my LG V30? I've tried all sorts of ways, but can't get it to work. Thanks.

Fair enough. Is there something I can do? Is there some way I can check to see why Firefox can play it on Android (presumably receiving more than one chunk!)?

Is there any hope of getting UAPP to play these streams? It seems a shame not to be able to play BBC radio in the highest quality.

Oh dear! So in theory, UAPP should be able to play HLS, but just not in this case?

Are you able to open a VPN to the UK and try it? I'm in th UK and it works in Android on Firefox Mobile and in Windows on MPC-HC.