[BoomBap08]

Has anyone in here tried using a Redmi 9a as a transport for their DAC?

Planning on getting one & a DDHifi tc03 as well to pair with my Fiio KA3.

Any thoughts if this would work?

 

[yawg]

Has anyone in here tried using a Redmi 9a as a transport for their DAC?

Planning on getting one & a DDHifi tc03 as well to pair with my Fiio KA3.

Any thoughts if this would work?

My Redmi Note 8 Pro works perfectly.

 

[yawg]

My Redmi Note 8 Pro works perfectly.

Watch out Xiaomi users: The latest update to MIUI 3 broke my Neutron player. Using HiBy now.

 

[yawg]

With some players you can use direct mode and bit-perfect conversion. So the bits of the recording go directly to the DAC/amp dongle. I use the E1DA 9038D in bit-perfect mode and the sound is perfect, too. No crackles, no hiss and no notification interruptions. Highly recommended. I use the Neutron player app and like it. The E1DA works in class A and is very powerful, can drive my Takstar magnetostatic planar cans and is individually calibrated by it's inventor/maker, Ivan.

Although I love the E1DA when I'm doing a long walk don't underestimate old FiiO DAC/amps. I got an Andes with nice B&W headphones for only 40€ on eBay and love it. It's got a nice Woolfson DAC and strong amp plus tone controls which are sometimes nice to have. Using it when I'm sitting in my garden.

 

[ds9kicks]

Well there is one reason why all audio data are resampled to a common rate for output on all common OSes, it's so that you don't get cutouts while switching from one hardware rate to another when the music format changes, say from the end of one album to the start of another coded at a different rate. In common usage you may even have multiple concurrent audio streams that need to be output at the same time (say multiple sound samples from a game, a notification sound, and background music all at the same time), and this can only work if all tracks are at a common rate, or resampled to a common rate if they aren't.

I am wanting to start listening to Tidal (lossless) using my android phone (S21) connected to my DAC (Schiit Modi Multibit) via USB. Making the connection is not an issue (I'm assuming I will need to use a powered USB hub to avoid the potential for a "too much power-draw" error). The issue I am wondering about is essentially what this thread is all about: what sample rate am I going to end up getting? Unfortunately my DAC does not have a display to indicate what the current sample rate is. I am assuming, based on what I have read so far on the topic, that I will be forced into a native Android output of 48 kHz / 16-bit, which in itself wouldn't be an issue for me (I consider either 44.1 or 48 kHz at 16-bit to be quite sufficient), but the issue is that I will be playing Tidal lossless which is at 44.1 kHz (I will have all my tracks pre-downloaded so I don't want to use the "master quality" setting, which is only available for certain tracks anyway). So therein lies the issue: having the Android system resample from 44.1 to 48 kHz. This is certainly not ideal and a situation which I would otherwise avoid, but if I want to use this setup, I don't see any way around this, particularly because I don't want to root my phone.

So all of that was a long-winded way of getting to my actual question: how "bad" is it to resample from 44.1 to 48 kHz? I'm guessing I will have every 45th-or-so sample essentially repeated twice-in-a-row in order to "up-sample" to 48 kHz; would this result in any perceived degradation in sound reproduction? Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated (or a tip as to how I can force my phone to output in 44.1 kHz without having to root it).

 

[goodvibes]

I am wanting to start listening to Tidal (lossless) using my android phone (S21) connected to my DAC (Schiit Modi Multibit) via USB. Making the connection is not an issue (I'm assuming I will need to use a powered USB hub to avoid the potential for a "too much power-draw" error). The issue I am wondering about is essentially what this thread is all about: what sample rate am I going to end up getting? Unfortunately my DAC does not have a display to indicate what the current sample rate is. I am assuming, based on what I have read so far on the topic, that I will be forced into a native Android output of 48 kHz / 16-bit, which in itself wouldn't be an issue for me (I consider either 44.1 or 48 kHz at 16-bit to be quite sufficient), but the issue is that I will be playing Tidal lossless which is at 44.1 kHz (I will have all my tracks pre-downloaded so I don't want to use the "master quality" setting, which is only available for certain tracks anyway). So therein lies the issue: having the Android system resample from 44.1 to 48 kHz. This is certainly not ideal and a situation which I would otherwise avoid, but if I want to use this setup, I don't see any way around this, particularly because I don't want to root my phone.

So all of that was a long-winded way of getting to my actual question: how "bad" is it to resample from 44.1 to 48 kHz? I'm guessing I will have every 45th-or-so sample essentially repeated twice-in-a-row in order to "up-sample" to 48 kHz; would this result in any perceived degradation in sound reproduction? Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated (or a tip as to how I can force my phone to output in 44.1 kHz without having to root it).

UAPP https://www.extreamsd.com/index.php/products/usb-audio-player-pro

 

[ds9kicks]

I am wanting to start listening to Tidal (lossless) using my android phone (S21) connected to my DAC (Schiit Modi Multibit) via USB. Making the connection is not an issue (I'm assuming I will need to use a powered USB hub to avoid the potential for a "too much power-draw" error). The issue I am wondering about is essentially what this thread is all about: what sample rate am I going to end up getting? Unfortunately my DAC does not have a display to indicate what the current sample rate is. I am assuming, based on what I have read so far on the topic, that I will be forced into a native Android output of 48 kHz / 16-bit, which in itself wouldn't be an issue for me (I consider either 44.1 or 48 kHz at 16-bit to be quite sufficient), but the issue is that I will be playing Tidal lossless which is at 44.1 kHz (I will have all my tracks pre-downloaded so I don't want to use the "master quality" setting, which is only available for certain tracks anyway). So therein lies the issue: having the Android system resample from 44.1 to 48 kHz. This is certainly not ideal and a situation which I would otherwise avoid, but if I want to use this setup, I don't see any way around this, particularly because I don't want to root my phone.

So all of that was a long-winded way of getting to my actual question: how "bad" is it to resample from 44.1 to 48 kHz? I'm guessing I will have every 45th-or-so sample essentially repeated twice-in-a-row in order to "up-sample" to 48 kHz; would this result in any perceived degradation in sound reproduction? Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated (or a tip as to how I can force my phone to output in 44.1 kHz without having to root it).

Not sure if anyone's posted this, but I've found a way to set the resampling rate. By default, my Dragonfly was mixing everything up to 96khz but I found a way to set the final sampling rate to 44.1khz as recommended in the Dragonfly Black's manual.
You'll need root for this.

ok I found the above posting which is very helpful, though it requires rooting. I am going to look into whether I can actually root my S21. in the meantime, I wonder if anyone has any insight as to just how undesirable it is to resample from 44.1 to 48 (or is Android native output at 96 kHz?) If it is at 96, I would imagine that the resampling from 44.1 wouldn't really be an issue as to the sound-reproduction quality?

 

[ds9kicks]

UAPP https://www.extreamsd.com/index.php/products/usb-audio-player-pro

(In reply to the above) cannot use a player app as I will be using Tidal as the player

 

[ds9kicks]

(In reply to the above) cannot use a player app as I will be using Tidal as the player

I think I spoke to soon with my above reply. Spurred by reading something elsewhere, I went back to read more about this USB Audio Player Pro, and it apparently has support for playing Tidal. I will look into this...

 

[Joe Bloggs]

I am wanting to start listening to Tidal (lossless) using my android phone (S21) connected to my DAC (Schiit Modi Multibit) via USB. Making the connection is not an issue (I'm assuming I will need to use a powered USB hub to avoid the potential for a "too much power-draw" error). The issue I am wondering about is essentially what this thread is all about: what sample rate am I going to end up getting? Unfortunately my DAC does not have a display to indicate what the current sample rate is. I am assuming, based on what I have read so far on the topic, that I will be forced into a native Android output of 48 kHz / 16-bit, which in itself wouldn't be an issue for me (I consider either 44.1 or 48 kHz at 16-bit to be quite sufficient), but the issue is that I will be playing Tidal lossless which is at 44.1 kHz (I will have all my tracks pre-downloaded so I don't want to use the "master quality" setting, which is only available for certain tracks anyway). So therein lies the issue: having the Android system resample from 44.1 to 48 kHz. This is certainly not ideal and a situation which I would otherwise avoid, but if I want to use this setup, I don't see any way around this, particularly because I don't want to root my phone.

So all of that was a long-winded way of getting to my actual question: how "bad" is it to resample from 44.1 to 48 kHz? I'm guessing I will have every 45th-or-so sample essentially repeated twice-in-a-row in order to "up-sample" to 48 kHz; would this result in any perceived degradation in sound reproduction? Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated (or a tip as to how I can force my phone to output in 44.1 kHz without having to root it).

It's certainly not as bad as you are imagining it to be, essentially you would be looking at losing a tiny bit of the top frequencies originally encoded by the 44.1kHz stream (above 20kHz) to the resampling process, and adding a bit of latency (which is a non-issue for music playback).

The way it's done is basically equivalent to decoding the stream to the output waveform and re-taking samples of it at the new sample rate. Close to lossless (with the caveat that the decoding stream needs to be lowpassed just below its Nyquist frequency to prevent aliasing in the resampled output, hence the slight loss of top frequencies).

(this kind of loss would have most likely already happened before, if the material wasn't originally mastered at 44.1kHz through and through (which it most likely wasn't, shouldn't)

Something like a HiBy R player does have deep level customizations of Android that mean you can run TIDAL at whatever sample rate it's actually putting out at any given time. (called Direct Transport Architecture in HiBy's case)

 

[ds9kicks]

It's certainly not as bad as you are imagining it to be, essentially you would be looking at losing a tiny bit of the top frequencies originally encoded by the 44.1kHz stream (above 20kHz) to the resampling process, and adding a bit of latency (which is a non-issue for music playback).

The way it's done is basically equivalent to decoding the stream to the output waveform and re-taking samples of it at the new sample rate. Close to lossless (with the caveat that the decoding stream needs to be lowpassed just below its Nyquist frequency to prevent aliasing in the resampled output, hence the slight loss of top frequencies).

(this kind of loss would have most likely already happened before, if the material wasn't originally mastered at 44.1kHz through and through (which it most likely wasn't, shouldn't)

Something like a HiBy R player does have deep level customizations of Android that mean you can run TIDAL at whatever sample rate it's actually putting out at any given time. (called Direct Transport Architecture in HiBy's case)

Thanks for the info. As I recently posted, I will be trying out the USB Audio Player Pro which someone else posted here, as it says it has support for Tidal, and you can apparently force the Android sample rate to that of your choosing (correct me if I'm wrong here).

A lot of the older music which I listen to I believe has likely never been resampled and should be in its native (never-resampled) 44.1 kHz / 16-bit format since that is also the "high quality" setting on Tidal. But let me know if I'm way off-base here.

 

[ds9kicks]

Thanks for the info. As I recently posted, I will be trying out the USB Audio Player Pro which someone else posted here, as it says it has support for Tidal, and you can apparently force the Android sample rate to that of your choosing (correct me if I'm wrong here).

A lot of the older music which I listen to I believe has likely never been resampled and should be in its native (never-resampled) 44.1 kHz / 16-bit format since that is also the "high quality" setting on Tidal. But let me know if I'm way off-base here.

And yes, I'd like to be bit-perfect, as the DAC I'm using (Schiit Modi Multibit, NOT THE CHEAPER MODI 3) actually performs bit-perfect decoding unlike most DACs which internally convert to DSD first (I can't remember what the term is for this conversion, but there is a term for it)

 

[ds9kicks]

And yes, I'd like to be bit-perfect, as the DAC I'm using (Schiit Modi Multibit, NOT THE CHEAPER MODI 3) actually performs bit-perfect decoding unlike most DACs which internally convert to DSD first (I can't remember what the term is for this conversion, but there is a term for it)

Ah, just remembered the term: it is an internal conversion to Pulse-Density Modulation (PDM) which most DACs do. The Schiit "Multibit" DACs preserve the Pulse-Code Modulation (PCM) all the way to the analog stage.

 

[yawg]

UAPP https://www.extreamsd.com/index.php/products/usb-audio-player-pro

I use Neutron. You can switch it to bit-perfect so no resampling.

 

[goodvibes]

I think I spoke to soon with my above reply. Spurred by reading something elsewhere, I went back to read more about this USB Audio Player Pro, and it apparently has support for playing Tidal. I will look into this...

Try switching to qobuz while your at it. It sounds better. No, I don't know why beside not caring for MQA but to me, it sounds better on every format.