nanaholic
Headphoneus Supremus
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- Sep 2, 2010
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i hope this is an appropriate post in this thread:
i'm a starting n00b into the head-fi and my current setup is an Onkyo DP-S1 mated either to IE800 or balanced Sony Z7s. I like everything about Onkyo, considering it's price bracket, but it does have terrible battery life and I wonder if stepping up to a more expensive DAP will be a noticeable improvement in sound quality. Someone that started with something that was a little more "budget" than WMA1 and eventually progressed to WMA1, can you please advise?
Specifically what i'm looking at, looking to get used, and hopefully keep budget under $850:
-WMA1 -- love the purity of this device, straight to the point, run your music in possibly the best sound quality available. great battery life, but i don't like only 1 sim card (in Onkyo i run dual 200gb which are about $80 cheaper than a single 400gb card).
-NW300 -- this seems like a phenomenal compromise and reading through many threads people state that the sound stage is very close to WMA1, especially in balanced mode. I really like the USB-DAC function, but i wonder if this makes this device a "jack of all trades master of none" type of device? priced about $300 less than WMA1. Battery life seems great
-A&K KANN -- like that this has 2 memory cards, battery life seems to be good and it's also somewhat of a flag ship device. Tidal streaming is a big bonus. But I am concerned about android system as I have to use a separate Android app on my mac to get it to talk to the device. I would imagine the sound stage would exceed NW300 and would be closer to WMA1 while offering USB-DAC and other already mentioned benefits
A&K 70II -- seems like a competitor to NW300, benefits would be USB-DAC function, tidal streaming. Battery life maybe not so good, definitely seems less than Sonys. How would it compare in sound stage to either of the Sony?
Overall I guess i'm just asking whether it's worth "upgrading" to any of these considering even the cheapest, used, unit above would cost me an additional $350 for what i paid for the Onkyo. Would the sound stage be 2-4x improvement, night & day, or will it be marginally improved and i'd have to listen very attentively to even find the difference?
One thing I reckon you need to be aware of is that Tidal support on AK players is not really known to be particularly good, and there is no offline support. You really need to think hard about your use case before thinking that Tidal support (with a big fat asterisks regarding limitation) is something you would put in the advantage column for AK players.