Hello fellow 300R owners. I received my unit from Amazon Japan last week. I've read through some of the pages on this thread, but frankly there is too much information to try to pour through all of it. I'm using it with the Sennheiser HD 660 S and an adapter to go from the balanced 4.4 mm plug to the 2.5 mm TRRS. I've been running it for some hours with audio burn in tones and signals to try and get it "broken in." It sounds like it still requires some tweaking for optimal performance.
I don't really care about streaming services, Android or being connected to a network. What I really want is to play my collection of ripped SACD's and purchased FLAC files (when DSD is not available) and be portable. I do not want it to be connected to a network or interacting with the Android OS too much. I don't supposed anyone has compiled a tweak sheet for everything you can do to strip out the extraneous software and unnecessary Android OS overhead?
As I was reading parts of this thread I was becoming concerned that Android may actually be mucking up the audio output. Is this still the case and what is the current workaround? Do people recommend using a audio file player other than the one Pioneer has included? What else should I be doing to optimize the 300R for my use case?
Thanks to any and all for their suggestions!
Hey, I've had my device for about a month now, the first thing I did when I got it was to go into Apps settings and uninstall all the Google bloatware and turn off / disable pretty much everything other than music related stuff
(which is just the music app in my case). I'm only listening in offline mode so I won't be needing wifi/bluetooth at all, plus it helps with the battery, so you'd wanna keep it off all the time. Also turn off the location services, don't think you need them and you'd just be wasting battery. Also note that balanced does drain the battery a bit faster, when I'm listening through balanced I get about 7 hours of playback compared to single-ended which gives me about 10-12 hours. I honestly don't hear any difference in the audio quality between the two apart from balanced being significantly louder, so I just run mine in single-ended mode for the most part, after all battery life is important to me.
Next, you can start using the Standalone mode button to turn off the screen, it does save a bit more battery compared to when you just turn off the screen with the button. I have mine as a widget on the desktop. Also I don't think Android is "limiting" your sound quality in any way, there is honestly not that much to tweak in this case and I think it already sounds fantastic straight out of the box. LG V20 was my previous primary portable "DAP" and it got really close to the 300R in terms of sound quality, but it is a phone after all and had its limitations. Also I did disable the lockscreen in the settings to allow me to get into my music selection faster.
As for the player, I'm using PowerAmp
(with a Material skin) and sound-wise it sounds the same to me as the player that Pioneer included, but it has much nicer UI with many more options to tweak. As well as great folder preview, which I use as my primary way of searching through my music. I've put a lot of work into organizing all folders and songs neatly and the stock Pioneer player doesn't even display album art in each folder which is just dumb to me.
The sound settings are kind of up to you, I personally don't hear much of a difference between them. The only thing you SHOULD turn on is the Variable Line Out Mode if you have the EU version, this will bypass some dumb EU volume regulations and allow you to use the full power of your amp. But if you want to know, I personally use Narrow & Slow combination, seems to be a touch faster and smoother
(around 10k-15k) than Normal & Sharp which is default.
(tested with: HD660S, Denon D7200, AQ NightOwl, CA Andromeda)
