[fe-lixx]

Not, the DAC features is decided by the CSR8645 so it can only supports 48k/16bit not matter what kind of DAC chip it includes. btw, you can buy our Q5 which supports DSD256, and aptX .

Thanks for the clarification.

Well, given the price tag and the fact that the USB feature is sort of a "bonus" you get on top of the Bluetooth functionality, it's still a nice feature. I'm assuming the BTR3 will drive sensitive IEMs especially well? So even at CD-level 16 bit / 44.1 or 48 kHz you'll have a much better output for your typical PC or notebook onboard sound. An additional USB chip with support for much improved performance would mean higher cost, less room for a battery, or a bigger device. I prefer it like this.

And I'm sure that sooner or later we'll see a device like the Q5 with Bluetooth support on the same level as the BTR3, right?

 

[Vergil]

Thanks for the clarification.

Well, given the price tag and the fact that the USB feature is sort of a "bonus" you get on top of the Bluetooth functionality, it's still a nice feature. I'm assuming the BTR3 will drive sensitive IEMs especially well? So even at CD-level 16 bit / 44.1 or 48 kHz you'll have a much better output for your typical PC or notebook onboard sound. An additional USB chip with support for much improved performance would mean higher cost, less room for a battery, or a bigger device. I prefer it like this.

And I'm sure that sooner or later we'll see a device like the Q5 with Bluetooth support on the same level as the BTR3, right?

I don't want to sound rude, but you guys should definitely download foobar with the ab test plugin. I bet you can't hear the difference between 256kbps aac and flac on your desktop setup, let alone 16 bit flac and 24 bit flac or dsd on a $70 bt dac+amp. Don't buy into the snake oil staff. aac or mp3 on the go, 16/44 flac for your home collection. Everything over this is nothing but a waste of space.

 

[fe-lixx]

I don't want to sound rude, but you guys should definitely download foobar with the ab test plugin. I bet you can't hear the difference between 256kbps aac and flac on your desktop setup, let alone 16 bit flac and 24 bit flac or dsd on a $70 bt dac+amp. Don't buy into the snake oil staff. aac or mp3 on the go, 16/44 flac for your home collection. Everything over this is nothing but a waste of space.

I agree with you, and you're right, properly encoded AAC is absolutely transparent to me, even at lower average bitrates than 256 kbps. I don't have a single DSD rip in my collection. But I ripped my CD collection knowing that I'd only do it one time, so with space not being an issue, FLAC is the obvious choice for archival purposes. And the higher resolution stuff I have are things from HDTracks and similar, and I simply keep them stored at that high resolution, because I want to keep the original, even if I know that I most certainly wouldn't hear the difference, if I downsampled it all to CD-level with a proper resampler like SoX. Back when I did some ABX testing, the impression that stuck, is that lossy -> lossy conversions can result in some artifacts, which I was able to hear in "problem samples" (some of them are known for certain codecs, you can look that up over at Hydrogenaudio, for example). So listening to lossless originals is more about making the whole thing a no-brainer for me. I don't even want to think about, if I *might* hear a slight improvement here or there, if I listened to a lossy rip.

That said, I think I'm realistic about my listening setup when I'm not at home, but on the go. Since all Bluetooth codecs are lossy, even though they're using very high bitrates (like LDAC in the highest mode), I know that I'm also using lossy files as a source. I don't carry around FLAC files, but I'm glad I have the FLAC at home, so I can convert and/or stream using a lossy codec without an additional lossy -> lossy conversion. I'm also using Spotify, which sounds totally fine to me, but when I'm at home, I just prefer to have the purely lossless experience - not because I think I can hear a difference, but because I don't even want to think about that.

We're miles off topic, though.

 

[Vergil]

I agree with you, and you're right, properly encoded AAC is absolutely transparent to me, even at lower average bitrates than 256 kbps. I don't have a single DSD rip in my collection. But I ripped my CD collection knowing that I'd only do it one time, so with space not being an issue, FLAC is the obvious choice for archival purposes. And the higher resolution stuff I have are things from HDTracks and similar, and I simply keep them stored at that high resolution, because I want to keep the original, even if I know that I most certainly wouldn't hear the difference, if I downsampled it all to CD-level with a proper resampler like SoX. Back when I did some ABX testing, the impression that stuck, is that lossy -> lossy conversions can result in some artifacts, which I was able to hear in "problem samples" (some of them are known for certain codecs, you can look that up over at Hydrogenaudio, for example). So listening to lossless originals is more about making the whole thing a no-brainer for me. I don't even want to think about, if I *might* hear a slight improvement here or there, if I listened to a lossy rip.

That said, I think I'm realistic about my listening setup when I'm not at home, but on the go. Since all Bluetooth codecs are lossy, even though they're using very high bitrates (like LDAC in the highest mode), I know that I'm also using lossy files as a source. I don't carry around FLAC files, but I'm glad I have the FLAC at home, so I can convert and/or stream using a lossy codec without an additional lossy -> lossy conversion. I'm also using Spotify, which sounds totally fine to me, but when I'm at home, I just prefer to have the purely lossless experience - not because I think I can hear a difference, but because I don't even want to think about that.

We're miles off topic, though.

We are in the same boat then. At home I leave everything as it is, no conversion or resampling. Most of my collection consists of 16/44 flacs from CDs, but I have a few high res albums. For $1000+ systems it's advisable to send the source to the DAC untouched (bit-perfect), so artifacts or quality loss introduced by a not so well implemented conversion is out of the question. On a $70 dac+amp I'd not worry about that. There are easier and more noticable ways to up the sq, than including a usb chip that can recieve high res without conversion. Your way of thinking is perfectly reasonable, it's just that 'high-res' is my trigger word. There are better terms to be triggered by though, like 'audiophile ethernet cable' (yep, that's a thing).

Also this is the BTR1 thread (not BTR3), so it's a bit messed up already. There's nothing wrong with contributing a little to that mess I guess

 

[fe-lixx]

We are in the same boat then. At home I leave everything as it is, no conversion or resampling. Most of my collection consists of 16/44 flacs from CDs, but I have a few high res albums. For $1000+ systems it's advisable to send the source to the DAC untouched (bit-perfect), so artifacts or quality loss introduced by a not so well implemented conversion is out of the question. On a $70 dac+amp I'd not worry about that. There are easier and more noticable ways to up the sq, than including a usb chip that can recieve high res without conversion. Your way of thinking is perfectly reasonable, it's just that 'high-res' is my trigger word. There are better terms to be triggered by though, like 'audiophile ethernet cable' (yep, that's a thing).

Also this is the BTR1 thread (not BTR3), so it's a bit messed up already. There's nothing wrong with contributing a little to that mess I guess

All right, the mess is made, I agree. :-D We should probably open a new thread for the BTR3 now that it's officially announced with details. The only missing thing on the FiiO site are the specs of all the connectors. Or is there a thread already and I missed it?

But yeah, I think we can agree about the most important points being made. Although I would disagree about the generalization that a price tag of a HiFi system is an indicator for hi-res content or even lossless vs. lossy content to be more easy to distinguish from one another, if you know what I mean. It's actually a not really well known phenomenon, specific to lossy compression, which highly relies on psychoacoustic models, that particularly bad equipment can emphasize on artifacts produced by lossy codecs. Even more curious is that there have been documented cases of people with certain hearing disabilities being able to detect some lossy compression much more accurately than a person with healthy hearing ever could - because the psychoacoustic models don't work for these individual edge cases. So in short, I want to say, that even cheap and more even outright BAD equipment can help you to detect lossy audio compression in blind tests, because the codecs were designed for some kind of middle ground. And the same goes for the people: We're all individuals, our hearing is more different and subjective than it's often acknowledged around here. Price tags really are overrated. You can have excellent setups with relatively low budgets. Most importantly, find a headphone or earphones that you really like and spend most of your money on them. Then you just need a decent source chain, from files -> (conversion/transcoding) -> DAC -> amp, basically. And that chain can be really affordable, thanks to manufacturers like FiiO. Yes, they cater to an audience where the "audiophile high resolution" stuff is hyped a lot - to each his own - but that doesn't mean that their products are generally bad because of it.

The theoretically required additional USB chip for a BTR3 to be able to process hi-res content via USB just doesn't make a lot of sense for this device. It just seems like a bit of a waste, given that the DAC chip they're using is capable of so much more. But like I said earlier, I prefer it the way FiiO has designed this thing: Focus on Bluetooth audio, and as a nice addition you get the USB connection. I can understand, if people wonder, why only 16/48 is supported over USB, but with the explanation given, I'd rather see them focus on something like optimizing the amp section after the DAC, so compatibility to many IEMs and smaller headphones will be good.

And for the people who really "want it all" in one package that's available right now in terms of portable USB DAC/amp + Bluetooth input, those are the people who I think will appreciate something like a Q5 on Bluetooth-steroids, whatever reason they need for that.

Drawing a line here: _____________________________________________________________________

I want to quote an earlier post I made a while ago that nobody seemed to be interested in, which surprised me a little. I know on Head-Fi it's a bit more about listening to devices and then describe your subjective, individual experience, instead of measuring devices. But I can't believe that only so few people seem to be interested in that aspect when buying new toys?

So forgive me for "bumping" this, I'll only do it once. If somebody thinks that the post should fit better in some other thread, please let me know or the mods, so it can be moved. I'd appreciate it.

An unrelated question regarding the Q5/X7 amp modules: I'm a fan of my Multi-BA IEMs and "it is known" that they deliver the most neutral frequency response on headphone outputs with an output impedance of near-zero. So I've been looking what module is closest to zero according to the specs. And to my surprise, it's not the AM1 (＜0.5 Ω（32Ω load）), though that is still a very good value, but the new AM2A (<0,3Ω (32Ω load) ). The AM2 has the same value as the AM1, so the AM2A was an improvement in this regard (I'm not talking about all the other values or overall quality, just the output impedance), while the AM3A has an increased value above the 1 Ohm mark (Unbalanced: < 1,2 Ω （32 Ω load), Balanced: < 1,7 Ω （32 Ω load）), which is not ideal for IEMs at all (yes, I know, the AM3A is not made specifically for IEMs), compared to its predecessor AM3 (＜0.3 Ω（32Ω load）), which is even as good as the AM2A.

What do you guys make of this? First of all, did anybody ever verifiy the specs stated by FiiO? (Not that I don't trust their specs, it would just be nice to have a second source with maybe even more detailed measurements than the standard measurement with a 32 Ohm load)
And more interestingly, has anybody made any RMAA measurements with "difficult" IEMs like the good old UE triple.fi 10 or customs with many drivers or any of the higher Westone models? I'm not looking for a subjective "sounds better"/"sounds worse" comparison, but simple hard facts that can be measured. My aim is to have a "reference amp" that's driving any IEMs as neutral as possible, without changing the frequency response due to higher output impedances. With such an amp it would be easier to compare different IEMs, no matter how many drivers they have, because the amp doesn't influence the IEMs' own characteristics, at least not the frequency response.

I remember a guy called BadRobot, who posted on the German HiFi-Forum. He made a lot of exactly this kind of measurements, but unfortunately his posts are outdated, the graphs were hosted on his own site, which is now dead and not in the Internet Archive, sadly, but of course, because of the age, he didn't compare modern models of amps. It would have been a nice demonstration, though, for how extremely the output impedance can influence the frequency response of a complex Multi-BA IEM.
Ooh, actually I just found a post of his, where the images/graphs are still intact, and the IEMs are still relevant, especially as a general example for higher-end IEMs with multiple drivers! http://www.hifi-forum.de/viewthread-211-590.html

I'm pretty sure he wouldn't mind, if I re-post his findings here. In this post he wanted to demonstrate that it isn't easy to find a player that drives his SE846s (and as comparison the TF10, which are known to be hard to drive) with as little influence to the near-linear frequency response of the players caused by the frequency dependent impedance of the complex IEMs. So these are no acoustic measurements, they're RMAA measurements of the players' frequency responses with the IEMs plugged in.

Spoiler: Abusing the spoiler button, so my post doesn't get HUGE

TF10 @ Hifiman HM801

SE846 @ Hifiman HM801

At this point he's apologizing about his setup for taking the measurements, because he didn't have the time yet to eradicate the problem causing the difference in the L/R channels, so this can be ignored.

He's pointing out an example of players like the that do have an output impedance near-zero, but still have an impedance dependent drop-off in the bass range, possibly caused by too small electrolyte coupling capacitors (I hope the translation of "Koppelelkos" is correct): The "Cowon" and "Colorfly".

TF10 @ Colorfly

SE846 @ Colorfly

SE846 @ iBasso DX100

SE846 @ Astell & Kern AK120 with a FiiO E17 in between as "additional damping factor"

SE846 @ Hifiman HM901 with IEM amp board

SE846 @ iBasso DX50

SE846 @ Astell&Kern AK240

If you want translations from the original post where Google translate doesn't make sense, I can try my best to translate.

 

[caprimulgus]

BTR3 thread here:
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/fii...ptx-aptx-ll-aptx-hd-ldac-and-hwa-lhdc.886101/

See you guys there!

 

[Vergil]

[...] Although I would disagree about the generalization that a price tag of a HiFi system is an indicator for hi-res content or even lossless vs. lossy content to be more easy to distinguish from one another [...]

I agree with you, but I never said such a thing. Some HiFi companies charge a hefty sum for their headphones / speakers, because they make lesser quality recordings quite enjoyable, while others raise the price tag along resolution, and of course don't forget those products that cost the earth simply because they can

What I actually meant was that, while nowadays you don't have to spend thousands upon thousands to get decent audio (eg. BTR3 + FH1), there will be some compromises when spending under $300 for the entire system. Resampling and audio going through the OS before reaching the DAC will be the least of your worries.

Personally I don't care about measurements and price tags (as long as I can afford it of course). What really matters is whether the product makes you enjoy music or not. Be it expensive or cheap, sonically superior or worse. After all you're not buying audio gear to listen to your setup. You're buying all those crap to listen to music, and if you ain't enjoying that, none of the audiophile crap matters.

 

[J The Killer]

How does the BTR1 compare with MPow bluetooth receiver/transmitter in terms of sound?

 

[FiiO]

You could have a try in the local store first.

Best regards

 

[razvanmg]

I currently have a fiio e10k/fiio a5 dac/amp combo. I am looking for something more portable. Would the ES100 provide a similar audio quality?

 

[razvanmg]

Will the btr3 have aptx HD?

 

[FiiO]

Will the btr3 have aptx HD?

Dear friend,

The APTX-HD is supported by the BTR3.

Best regards

 

[PeterMac]

to remove

 

[FiiO]

Introducing the FiiO BTR1K Portable High-Fidelity Bluetooth Amplifier

Make A Difference with the Upgraded Chip

Thanks to the all-new Qualcomm QCC 3005 Bluetooth chip, the BTR1K is able to support Bluetooth 5.0 and all-new Bluetooth profile as well as various audio codecs--such as the aptX, aptX low latency, SBC and AAC. All of this ensures a stable, high quality Bluetooth audio experience that will bring you closer to how your music was intended to be heard.

 

[FiiO]

Introducing the FiiO BTR1K Portable High-Fidelity Bluetooth Amplifier

High-performance AK4376A DAC brings improved performance

Owing to the QCC Bluetooth chip, the BTR1K is equipped with more room for an optimized algorithm. Compared to the original BTR1, the BTR1K is now able to get an extremely low＜2uV noise floor and extremely high 120dB Signal-to-Noise ratio as well as an improved by 50% output power, means that you will be able to catch every last nuance and detail in your music.