[Wouter]

Hello all,
 
I own a HTC Desire S mobile phone which almost holds my entire music collection on the 32GB micro SD card. So far so good. However, I consider the sound quality of this device using my Grado SR60i headphones pretty bad.
 
I wonder whether connecting it through bluetooth to bluetooth headphones, might improve the sound. After all, bluetooth is a digital connection, isn't it? So in theory this should bypass the internal dac and amp of the HTC and use the (better?) dac and amp in the headphones. Is this correct? If so, any advice considering the headphones is very welcome.
 
An even better option would be to connect it to an portable headphone dac/amp and then use my Grado's again. However Android 2.3 does not support that over USB and I doubt that HTC will upgrade this device (made in 2011!) to ICS. Apparently there are no portable dac/amps using a bluetooth connection, are there?
 
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this.
 
Wouter 

 

[JK1]

Blutooth decreases the sound quality. It will also decrease the battery life.  I had the original Grado SR60 and didn't like it.
 
Try getting some other headphones with a cord. If you still don't like the sound quality, then get an mp3 player. The $35 Sandisk Clip+ 4GB has great sound quality and a micro SDHC card slot, so you can add a card up to 32GB. A 32GB card is only around $35, while a 16GB card is around $18.

 

[Wouter]

Thanks JK1, could you please help me understand why bluetooth decreases sound quality?
If the A2DP bluetooth profile is used, there should be more than enough bandwith available to stream high quality audio.
Since the connection itself is digital, the sound quality should depend on the quality of the components in the bluetooth headphones (dac/amp), providing the dac/amp of the source device is bypassed.
 
If the dac and amp in the source component are not bypassed and the actual analog output is being converted into a digital bluetooth signal again, then I can very well imagine that the sound quality decreases.
But what would be the point in converting a digital audio source to analog and then to digital again for bluetooth transfer?
It seems much more efficient to send the digital audio source directly over bluetooth tot the headphones.
Yet I'm not a technical specialist, so I simply don't know. I would like to understand though.
 
Thanks for the advice about the Clip+, however I like the user interface of the HTC and I doubt that I can find my way that easy through 3500 songs on a Clip+ .. I also doubt that other headphones on the HTC will make much of a difference, as I am perfectly happy with the Grado SR60i's on our iPad2, iPod touch and Squeezebox touch/Cambridge Audio 650A amp. I also tried my Sennheiser PX100 headphones on the HTC with the same disappointing results.