Quote:
I must ask how does this rig
sound, Perform ( power usage ), & Will it work with other 'Droid based Smart phones???
Paul, I am hardly qualified to review headphones and amp/dacs. I am very, very new at this and I have no other devices to compare sound quality with...
What I can say is that when MY ears judge several configs of Galaxy S3 and D-Zero, this is how I rate them using Poweramp as Android player (best on top).
1. Galaxy S3 > USB OTG > D-Zero as dac and amp > M-80's (sounds cleaner, bass goes lower with more punch, treble more extended, wider sound stage)
2. Galaxy S3 > 3.5 mm > D-Zero as amp only > M-80's (everything less good than above)
3. Galaxy S3 > M-80's (I liked this when I had no amp/dac, now this combo sounds cramped and muddy).
So yeah, for $109 the D-Zero gives me much better sound in a very portable set-up. Crappy recordings sound crappier and good recordings shine much more. I had a lot of 128 Kbps and 192 AAC's. Those are almost unlistenable now. So I am re-ripping my cd's to 320 Kbps now and my favorite ones to FLAC. I used FLAC files from Weather Report, Miles Davis, Kraftwerk, Maxwell, Cassandra Wilson etc. to do the comparison above.
I think that combo 1 above drains the Galaxy's battery faster than 2 and 3. But I may have left the USB charge switch on the D-Zero to ON.
When I compare the sound quality of the D-Zero to that of an Aune T1 tube dac/amp powering my M-80's, using the same tracks but played from Decibel on my Macbook Pro, the D-Zero (also hooked up to the MAc) does not even come close. The same goes for the sound when watching movies on an iPad 1, using a camera connector kit to the dac. The Aune T1 always wins. But it is not portable...
I have no other Android devices than the Galaxy S3. It is a stock T-Mobile international S3 model GT-19300, Android version 4.1.2, baseband I19300CEELL1, kernel 3.0.31-566833.