QsTree
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2014
- Posts
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Even better than FiiO M6?
Nice one but the battery life of only 13h would be a NO GO for me. Hence I still prever the A55.
Even better than FiiO M6?
Nice one but the battery life of only 13h would be a NO GO for me. Hence I still prever the A55.
A55 has Bluetooth Receiver for streamingDoes A55 support streaming services (Tidal, Spotify, etc)?
A55 has Bluetooth Receiver for streaming
AFAIK all three models use the same Sony's S-Master HX DAC & amplifier. They should sound identical.can anyone give comparison between A35,A45 and A55 in terms of sound quality?
is there an upgrade in each iteration?
Streaming to A50 over Bluetooth and then using a wired/wireless is meaningless. You are doing WAV -> Ogg/AAC ->SBC/AAC/LDAC or wired. The audio quality is already degraded at step 2. Step 3 degrades it further and rather pointless to use a DAP if you are going to use Bluetooth.
Not really a meaningful or accurate comparison. Sure, WAV—> SBC is degraded, maybe twice depending on the device.
However, most streaming content is already served using lossy compression (I.e. MP3, Ogg, AAC).
Using Bluetooth from a good mobile device will support aptX HD or LDAC BT transmission. Using these codecs, aptX HD or LDAC, there is WAY more bandwidth than necessary to preserve fidelity from lossy codecs.
Any, you are getting a far superior DAC/amp than what is available in most phones (if it even has a built-in DAC/amp) and what is available in most BT headphones.
Fidelity is lost due to encoding not due to lack of RF bandwidth. Even Bluetooth 2.0's meagre 600kbps is more than sufficient.
Even without padding, uncompressed Redbook audio is 44100*2*16/1000 = 1411.2kbps which is more than 990kbps. I don't know that can be passed unaltered, if not lossy.? The LDAC source code is available on Android. Let me dig into it when I am free.But the more important point is that 16-bit, 44.1 kHz CD quality content passes through the codec unaltered, as the available bit-depth for transmission more than exceeds the required 16-bits. So, this will certainly be the case with lossy content, like MP3/Ogg/AAC.
Streaming to A50 over Bluetooth and then using a wired/wireless is meaningless. You are doing WAV -> Ogg/AAC ->SBC/AAC/LDAC or wired. The audio quality is already degraded at step 2. Step 3 degrades it further and rather pointless to use a DAP if you are going to use Bluetooth.
I've been streaming basic Tidal mp3 over LDAC with the A55 to wired headphones and find it totally acceptable quality for non-critical listining/commuting (not that I do much critical listening to begin with- also, frankly a more stable/usable connection than the ES100 or via phone USB, and a less battery draining connection than using phone hotspot to connect to a wifi streaming DAP).
I might marginally prefer the audio of the A55 to my v30 and even to the similarly featured ES100 dongle and Hiby R3, but (like the R3/ES100) it also gives me hardware playback and fine grain volume controls