goodyfresh
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2015
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There are a number of "cut to the chase" methodologies for testing DAPs.
One key to effective testing is to use the best standard possible for your reference, and IMO that starts with a good clean rip of the recording being used or its equivalent.
IME many DAPs such as the Sansa Fuze have what I consider to be marginal performance when it comes to THD, noise, and maximum voltage output into headphone loads.
Ideally one likes to have reference standards that are at least from 10 to 20 dB better than the UUT.
Mid-priced headphone amps such as Fiio E11K seem to measure equal or better that most DAPs in these areas, so a .wav file played through a pro-audio interface such as a M-Audio AP24192 driving a Fiio E11K has become one of my references for evaluating DAPs.
Doing an ABX test of DAPs the most obvious way would involve the use of some kind of switch box to move the connections headphones or other monitoring system between the two sources being compared. I am fortunate to have a hardware ABX system at my disposal - the one described here:
http://djcarlst.provide.net/abx_hdwr.htm
Nice that you have that ABX setup, man! Once I have more DAP's in my "collection" in the future I'll almost certainly go and get something similar.