Received my DPX1 early Saturday … spent a good amount of time stuck in the hospital over the weekend with it and my super-high-level first impressions so far fall out like this:
From a positive perspective, the DPX1 sounds excellent driving a variety of headphones using the built-in music application via either of the analog outputs (details in a follow-up post). If you want something to use primarily/solely with its built-in DAC and headphone amplifier, playing only locally-stored music then it’s a very nice solution.
If that’s how you’re going to use it, I’d recommend it quiet heartily.
On the negative it has some rather rough-edges from an overall-experience perspective. It’s quite fiddly if you want to use it with an external DAC (I was using a Mojo for my testing so far), want/need to use more than one player application and want to avoid Android’s forced upsampling (if you don’t mind the built-in upsampling then most of the fiddliness goes away). The headphone and balanced output jacks seem rather fragile.
In general, right now, I think I’m going to have to return the unit. Either it has faulty Bluetooth or it’s just a very poor implementation, but that’s part of how I need to use it and given the general fussiness of operation in other areas I’m unconvinced it’s worth persevering with. That's not a quibble about sound-quality - I found no issues there so far, purely about quality of overall experience and actual usability of the device for my use cases.
That said, a few specific thoughts so far, and I’ll post more, with pictures when I’m around properly tomorrow.
Bluetooth:
Borderline unusable.
With the DPX1 sitting on a desk three feet away from my current Bluetooth headphones (BluBudsX and Momentum 2.0 Wireless) and with unobstructed line of sight it works fine and sounds excellent via Bluetooth.
If I put the DPX1 in any of my pants pockets, like I do when I take a walk at lunchtime, then quality is very noticeably reduced – for the little bits of music you can hear - and it’s plagued by constant series of dropouts (and I mean every few seconds).
If I put it my shirt pocket (which puts it within 1 foot of the headphone receiver in the worst case) then it will play without dropouts, again at very much reduced quality, but if I turn my head (as when looking to cross a road), it drops out completely and stays that way until I turn my head back.
In my 2012 Range Rover it has to be positioned very specifically to play without drop outs.
I have yet to get it to play music in my 2011 Aston Martin.
I’ve tried restarting the unit, repairing the devices, tried with multiple headphones and with the DPX1 in every orientation I can practically use and this issue remains. I’m willing to believe it’s a faulty unit, but given the other issues I have so far if I have to return it then I won’t be bothering with a replacement.
Beyond that it retains the usual Android funkiness/fussiness about pairing devices and actually telling you what they are before they time out of the pairing process. It also does not play well with multi-connected devices in that it doesn’t want to give up the connection once it takes it. That’s not an issue I’ve seen on any of my other Bluetooth hosts.
In comparison to my iPhone 6S it doesn't matter in what pocket I put that phone, it maintains a solid connection, has yet to drop out at all, unless I walk halfway across the house, and the quality remains indistinguishable to when the phone it just sitting on the desk in front of me.
User Experience:
I’m pretty well versed with Android, despite not being a daily Android user, coming from previously owning a mobile development studio and being an active developer in both spaces (among other things). As a result I was expecting the usual degree of quasi-schizophrenic fussiness in how things have to be done – and it was, as expected, quite present.
Plugging in an external DAC the first time launched the built-in Music app, with a prompt asking if the player should use the DAC by default in future. Saying “Yes” to this means that the Music app launches every time I connect the DAC. That’s not what the prompt actually seems to ask, but that’s what it does.
About half the time I wind up having to manually select the output device anyway.
After installing USB Audio Player Pro (UAPP) and connecting my DAC, BOTH applications launched and prompted me the same way. After responding to these prompts multiple times I finally got it to behave in a manner that just launches UAPP when the DAC is connected (and not to bug me with the same preference setting EVERY time I connected the DAC).
Exiting UAPP properly generally releases the DAC for use by other applications. The built-in Music app isn’t quite so good about that. But, in my general playing around I’ve had to disconnect and reconnect the DAC completely more often than not to be able to use it with a different player. And a few times the only way to get it to work has involved powering the DPX1 off and on again.
Not-unexpected based on my previous experiences with Android, both as a developer and a user, but very fiddly and annoying and it’s a far cry from my iPhone where AT MOST I would have to select the DAC I wanted to use (by name not just a generic “USB Audio” moniker) if I plugged it in while already playing via Airplay, Bluetooth or the internal headphone jack.
TIDAL:
Can only play natively through the Android audio stack … which means forced upsampling.
Oddly, as tracks fade out in the native TIDAL client there is some significant graininess and distortion that is not present when playing that content via UAPP or any other TIDAL player on any other platform.
No idea if that’s something weird about the DPX1 or standard behavior for the TIDAL client on Android.
You CAN stream TIDAL directly through UAPP. This works quite well and bypasses all the upsampling nastiness. The only caveats I have here are that the browsing experience is pretty weak and depending on which path you take through UAPP to get your music playing you may, or may not, get the album art.
Sadly UAPP has some stability and UX inconsistency issues that can make it quite frustrating. I think, in most cases, if you’re just choosing a playlist or album and hitting “play” it’s fine. The stability starts to get iffy when you’re doing a lot of navigation or when changing your chosen output. So far it’s locked the entire player up to the point of having to power-it off about half a dozen times in two and a half days.
Battery Life:
Playing locally stored 16/44.1 files either through Mojo or over Bluetooth using the built-in Music player I’m getting about 5-6% battery depletion per hour of play. That’s with the screen off, but with WiFi and Bluetooth enabled (I’m not the type to keep turning those options on and off all the time).
I’ve not timed it using the internal DAC/amp yet, nor have I been able to use “Standalone” mode (only works with the built-in player and the analog outputs). Should have an update on that tomorrow.
