[triumsg]

If you are on budget, go for usb c - 3.5/2.5 mm.

ibasso dc01/2/3, e1da 9038s, meizu HD pro dac etc.

Thanks - that's a good alternative!

 

[RishiGuru]

All meizu mx4 pro, meizu 5 pro, vivo x5max have the es9018k2m dac. I once thought to have mx4 pro but no memory card slot stopped me from buying. Then I got the x5max which set a standard for music quality with headphones for me. Then 5 pro got released next and i again got exited. it has the same dac of x5max and many audio tech.. blah blah balh. 5Pro also had card slot so i paid a lot for the 64 gb version. Unfortunately the phone died just after 2 years of use. Here we have no where to take to mend this meizu phones importaed from china. In those two years and hearing thousand of songs between x5max and 5pro i found both have distinct advantages. 5 pro is more softer sounding, better and fuller bass. Like xplay6. x5max have slightly less bass but mid to high tones are more revealing, you hear more details. x5max have slightly less max volume than 5pro. As i always repeat the balance of lows, mids and highs are very important for me. In that case x5max always had the upper hand and i always preffered the vivo over meizu. If the x5max got dead instead just like 5pro, i will be compelled to to buy another. For me x5max set a benchmark in phone audio, and for the next years all tried to better it, but it was only xplay5s that was able to bettered it. That too an improvement just by a hair margin over x5max. Now I hear the about nex s and x50pp that are great audio wise but until i listen, i doubt they are better than my x5max, xplay5s. So to me vivo has a better audi0 tuning and sound signature than meizu. This is my opinion however.

From all your posts it seems you have a strong liking for Natural Sound. To me natural sound signature is like crystal clear water flowing through ear canals where transparency and separation is of utmost precedence. On the other camp, we have this sweet sound signature, which gives more emphasis on vocals and its timbre, sounding more humane and musical to my ears.

Over the years I have started to respect both. Both sound signature have their strengths and weakness. There are some music which I enjoy more with natural sound signature style, and some with the other type. My Vivo NEX S & Vivo X5Max are two prime examples of having sound signature as polar opposites. The NEX S have controlled muscular bass, rich vocals and enjoyable highs. It is very sweet sounding and very forgiving to any song irrespective of genre & also on headphones. X5Max on the other hand can best be described in having tight and fast paced bass, slightly thin vocals and transparent highs. Its like X5Max will remove many layers of sonic glaze for free for better purity. However this causes X5Max to sound a touch dry when paired with monitor kind of headphones. Pair the same with NEX S and sound is full bodied & lush with just the amount of highs to enjoy to the full.

Meizu MX4 Pro and Meizu 5 Pro was never available on our country but it is good to know how they sounded. It is stark contrast to the neutral type of sound signature I found on Meizu 16th (Meizu 16 in China). However in many ways I really enjoy my 16th as it has a revealing kind of sound with a knack for detail retrieval. In the end the manufacturer is very important to me. Vivo, LG, Meizu have the audio background and know-how in terms of internal circuit design and audio tuning which provides a final sound signature worthy for appreciation. Not something like LeTv which came out of nowhere and produced a monster like Le Max smartphone with ESS based hifi audio chip and disappeared as quickly as they came. The sound of the Le Max, well was neither sweet or neutral to me and the audio part was just not done right for me. It takes years for a company to have the experience in audio tuning. Vivo for example was running an audio lab since 2010 even before they entered into smartphone business. That 10 years of experience just shines when you hear music through a Vivo NEX S or Vivo X50 Pro Plus.

 

[revand]

If you are on budget, go for usb c - 3.5/2.5 mm.

ibasso dc01/2/3, e1da 9038s, meizu HD pro dac etc.

Don't forget the Zorloo Ztella. I just completed my review (use Google Translate for it) and found that in 2020 those who want to buy an audiophile mobile phone should not worry about the DAC inside the phone, since the 5 gr Ztella adapter simply provides a very decent sound using TIDAL's IOS app, or UAPP Android app (USB Audio Player Pro), which bypasses Android's own (poor) audio system. In 2020 most of the phones do not have a 3,5 mm jack socket so you need a USB C/Lightning to 3,5 mm adapter any way, but there are huge differences between the SQ of these adapters. The adapter Apple supplies for their phones are rubbish compared with the surprisingly good sounding MQA renderer Zorloo Ztella. The Ztella with a symmetrical (2,5 mm) output is coming in Q4 and considering my recent experience with audio devices having symmetrical output (e.g. Ibasso DC01 and iFi ZEN DAC) the MQA renderer Ztella with a symmetrical output will most probably deliver a sound which can be compared with mid-range DAPs and better than any present mobile phone can provide.

 

[CarolNowak]

While the audio chip used inside a smartphone have always been the main marker of audio performance, in actuality it is just part of the whole equation. Great audio quality from a phone comes from a multitude of factors like:

1) Audio chips (DAC, I/V converters & headphone amplifiers)
2) Power Supply
3) Overall audio topology/ circuit design used inside the phone
4) Shielding used to stop analog audio signal interference by digital circuits

For any audio chip to provide maximum performance, it requires un-adulterated power (in watts) straight from the phone battery. This is where high quality power supplies becomes very important which does this specific job. These power-supply circuits have dedicated paths to draw power straight from the battery. Power is then conditioned & filtered using high quality audio capacitors to provide power to audio chips. Providing stable maximum rated power to any audio chip will yield maximum performance from it. Next are the audio chips, like DACs which may require ancillary components like oscillators to provide correct information to DACs. Using a symmetrical audio circuit topology with high quality of circuit components in the entire audio chain is most important. Remember the audio is as good as the weakest link in the chain. So using high quality audio capacitors, resistors in the circuit is very important.

Finally, the generated analog audio signal emanated from the inbuilt DAC and passed through the converters & op-amps and finally to the audio jack needs to be properly shielded from the digital circuits in the phone. If not done properly it can induce noise to the final analogue audio signal degrading sound quality. If all these criteria's are met, chances are you having a great audio centric smartphone.

Taking LG out of the equation, I can think of Vivo & Meizu as the only two manufactures who are producing audio centric phones to-date. I will only be speaking of phones which are readily available.

Vivo divides its audio implementation into:

a) HiFi 2.0 Architecture (Best): This circuit design takes care of the all four factors mentioned above.

1) Vivo NEX S: Cirrus Logic CS43199 (DAC) + (3 X Analog Devices SSM6322)
2) Vivo X50 Pro Plus: Cirrus Logic CS43131
3) IQOO 5 Pro: Cirrus Logic CS43131 (IQOO is a sub-brand of Vivo)

b) HiFi 1.0 Architecture (Great): This takes care of some of the factors mentioned above.
1) Vivo X50 Pro: AKM AK4377A
2) Vivo NEX 3/3S: AKM AK4377A
3) IQOO 3: AKM AK4377A

As far as I know, Samsung and Oppo uses Qualcomm audio chips for their flagship devices. I own Meizu's last flagship with a headphone jack, the Meizu 16th of 2018. After that model they went the Apple way and omitted the audio jack. You now need to pay extra cash to buy a digital audio dongle. (USB to 3.5mm) from them for their latest flagship Meizu 17/ 17 Pro. However their best dongle is very good using Cirrus Logic CS43131 internally.

Meizu 16th to me is an example of audio done right on a smartphone. It uses an unknown WCD9341 audio chip from Qualcomm. The chip is actually the flagship audio codec from Qualcomm and mates with their flagship 8XX processor lineup. Spec-wise the WCD9341 is right there with AKM AK4377A, so Meizu being a manufacturer from audio background knew WCD9341 potential and did the basics right. They provided the WCD9341 ample power it needs to perform in its high performance mode with dedicated power supply (other manufacturers seldom do this as it requires more money to be spent on power supply circuit). Made a good circuit design to implement the WCD9341 and finally provided dedicated metal shielding to the chip and its circuits in the main PCB board. Voila, now have a Meizu 16th using an unknown WCD9341 audio chip with audio quality right up there with my Vivo X21UD having AKM AK4376A!!!

Similarly, the audio chips are same for both Vivo X50 Pro Plus & IQOO 5 Pro but the performance is different. IQOO took mostly the same design and audio chip from X50 Pro Plus but compromised on the power supply to save money. Hence the headphone output gain is much higher on Vivo than IQOO. On naked eye it will be assumed both have same performance as both uses the same audio chip which is not the case in reality. As I say, the devil is in the details.

Great post. How is nex s as a phone? Can I use it as my main phone in 2020 if gsm bands are supported for my country? Now I find the lg v40 became cheap here but battery backup is the worst among all flagship in last five years. My friends v40 drains battery like hell.

 

[TheUnknow]

a) HiFi 2.0 Architecture (Best): This circuit design takes care of the all four factors mentioned above.

1) Vivo NEX S: Cirrus Logic CS43199 (DAC) + (3 X Analog Devices SSM6322)
2) Vivo X50 Pro Plus: Cirrus Logic CS43131
3) IQOO 5 Pro: Cirrus Logic CS43131 (IQOO is a sub-brand of Vivo)

Nex S is truely the latest HiFi 2.0 device , as both X50 Pro Plus and Iqoo 5 Pro don't have an audio jack but an USB dongle.

Newly announced X50e come with an audio jack (AK4377a so HiFi 1.0)

 

[RishiGuru]

Nex S is truely the latest HiFi 2.0 device , as both X50 Pro Plus and Iqoo 5 Pro don't have an audio jack but an USB dongle.

Newly announced X50e come with an audio jack (AK4377a so HiFi 1.0)

In a sense you are correct. Vivo's HiFi 2.0 model takes care of proper shielding on analogue audio signal from all digital signals of the phone. By letting the analogue and digital signals mix at a common USB port on Vivo X50 Pro Plus indeed looses the HiFi 2.0 status. Same for Iqoo 5 Pro.

NEX S is truly the last HiFi 2.0 model phone from Vivo. All the China publication reviews and comparison between those three have gone in favor of NEX S. Glad I have two pieces of this gem.

 

[Kalnet101]

So I've decided to humor myself and put a DSD album into my Vivo X50 Pro and uh... it actually works? I thought it won't work since the specs didn't mentioned any DSD support so I was ready to be let down, but wow it does work in the end. It's my first time listening from a DSD track and it sounds wonderful! It works on the Vivo music app as well and it acknowledges it's a .DSF file. The Vivo music app sounded quiet and air-y whereas the Fiio app makes it more bright, wide, and natural. This is a DSD64 album for those wondering. Just thought of sharing this with everyone!

 

[artpiggo]

So I've decided to humor myself and put a DSD album into my Vivo X50 Pro and uh... it actually works? I thought it won't work since the specs didn't mentioned any DSD support so I was ready to be let down, but wow it does work in the end. It's my first time listening from a DSD track and it sounds wonderful! It works on the Vivo music app as well and it acknowledges it's a .DSF file. The Vivo music app sounded quiet and air-y whereas the Fiio app makes it more bright, wide, and natural. This is a DSD64 album for those wondering. Just thought of sharing this with everyone!

It is not processing native dsd since the logo is not DSD instead of HiFi. (Only xp5s,6,nex s I think)

It is DSD to PCM process. But if you listen it good, then it is good.

 

[Kalnet101]

It is not processing native dsd since the logo is not DSD instead of HiFi. (Only xp5s,6,nex s I think)

It is DoP process. But if you listen it good, then it is good.

I see I see. Will take note on that. Yes, it sounds great!

 

[RishiGuru]

It is not processing native dsd since the logo is not DSD instead of HiFi. (Only xp5s,6,nex s I think)

It is DSD to PCM process. But if you listen it good, then it is good.

Vivo have only two models supporting native DSD playback. Vivo Xplay6 and Vivo NEX S.

I have a question mark regarding Vivo X50Pro+, but unless anybody confirms for native DSD support let us keep it out of the list.

 

[RishiGuru]

So I've decided to humor myself and put a DSD album into my Vivo X50 Pro and uh... it actually works? I thought it won't work since the specs didn't mentioned any DSD support so I was ready to be let down, but wow it does work in the end. It's my first time listening from a DSD track and it sounds wonderful! It works on the Vivo music app as well and it acknowledges it's a .DSF file. The Vivo music app sounded quiet and air-y whereas the Fiio app makes it more bright, wide, and natural. This is a DSD64 album for those wondering. Just thought of sharing this with everyone!

For music, the de-facto standard for Android is PCM. 95% of all audio file formats you use be in FLAC, MP3, WAV, APE, ... are all PCM. In Vivo smartphones the HiFi logo pops-up in notification bar when it recognizes a PCM file format and sends the PCM digital audio data straight to in-built HiRes audio chip.

There is another rarely used high fidelity audio format in smartphones, named DSD. Audio files of DSD type are of DSF & DFF formats. There are some top-tier HiFi audio chips found in some smartphones like Vivo NEX S which supports hardware decoding of DSD in the chip itself. These audio chips can process unconverted/un-adulterated DSD streams in its purest form to achieve highest audio fidelity possible. In other words, they can perform native DSD playback.

However transporting this huge amount of DSD audio data through Android to the audio chip is a challenge by itself. Also Android is not too kind to DSD. So what Vivo's default music player does is "DSD over PCM" (DoP) containerisation, which is sending "native" DSD in containerized form. In DoP, the DSD data isn't altered or changed in anyway, its pure. In short, DoP is a PCM container of raw DSD stream.

The DoP compatible music players (Vivo default music player/ UAPP) are actually converting the very high frequency binary digits of the DSD file (stored in phone memory as DSF/DFF file formats) on real-time to a continuous encoded PCM stream and sending it straight to the DoP compatible inbuilt audio chip.

The advantage of DoP is the "extra processing" required for this PCM containerization by music players are negligible. The downside of DoP protocol is it requires markers during DoP encoding to identify the signal as DSD by the audio chip, so using this protocol requires double the bandwidth compared to the native DSD signal alone. This reduces the maximum DSD frequency that can be used with DAC by half. This may explain why a DSD256 stream capable DAC can stop at DSD128. If we think of DoP from PCM perspective in which it is transmitted from audio player to the audio chip, below are the requirements:

1) DSD64 requires a 176.4kHz PCM package
2) DSD128 requires a 352.8kHz PCM package
3) DSD256 requires a 705.6kHz PCM package

When Vivo NEX S audio chip recognizes DoP data is sent, i.e. in native DSD format, it opens the DoP container and starts hardware decoding of raw DSD streams inside it. Now the DSD logo pops-up in the notification bar instead of normal HiFi logo.

For your Vivo X50 Pro, the in-built audio chip does not support DSD format. So, what is happening is that the default Vivo music player is software decoding the DSD audio data to PCM data (which results in some loss in audio quality but still great) and then sends the DSD to PCM converted PCM data to the audio chip. The audio chip in your X50 Pro knows nothing from where the data originates from DSD or PCM.

However it is good to know you are enjoying the X50 Pro so much. Enjoy.

 

[onedvt]

Hi everyone, I'm new here and was wondering if anyone's done any impressions on the new Sony Xperia 5 II? Would like to know what DAC chip is used and whether its up to par with the best performing mobile phones audio-wise. Did some searching on here but yielded no results.

 

[mainguy]

Hi everyone, I'm new here and was wondering if anyone's done any impressions on the new Sony Xperia 5 II? Would like to know what DAC chip is used and whether its up to par with the best performing mobile phones audio-wise. Did some searching on here but yielded no results.

I have the 1 ii which uses the same audio tech.

The jack is great, no two ways about it. I’m not sure why. My main portable point of comparison is a chord mojo, which it obviously cannot match; but it does deliver A compelling alternative. A warm, clear, and pleasant sound, which I’ve never really discovered in a portable device. It seems first rate to me!

 

[onedvt]

I have the 1 ii which uses the same audio tech.

The jack is great, no two ways about it. I’m not sure why. My main portable point of comparison is a chord mojo, which it obviously cannot match; but it does deliver A compelling alternative. A warm, clear, and pleasant sound, which I’ve never really discovered in a portable device. It seems first rate to me!

Thanks for sharing. Do you know what DAC chip the 1 ii uses?

 

[Zerstorer_GOhren]

Thanks for sharing. Do you know what DAC chip the 1 ii uses?

Built in WCD DAC from Snapdragon processor.